In the age of streamed content, advertisers have had to contend with the fact that watching adverts is optional. Even on television, recording technology means adverts can be skipped. Sick of adverts at the cinema? Wait twenty minutes before going into the theatre. Endure five seconds of advertising on YouTube before activating the skip button. 

If you can’t force people to watch adverts and become interested in your brand, what options are left? Make something people want to watch. Something entertaining. And for a lot of advertisers, that means something funny. 

The Joke's On You

The price of being humourless is no joke; a lot of the most successful adverts in the past decade have relied on drawing laughs to retain attention. In this edition of Advert Alchemy, Squideo is looking at ten of the most successful – and funniest – adverts from the past 20 years. 

01. Turn Down for What

One of the top ten most watched adverts on YouTube was an installation of Apple’s Apple at Work series, Escape from the Office. The advert is almost nine minutes long, yet it’s garnered over 35 million views within one year. Throughout the advert is a constant stream of Apple products, even a clip from one of Apple TV’s hit shows Ted Lasso, but this feels secondary to the narrative. 

Apple created this advert off the back of The Great Quit phenomenon, as a record number of people quit their jobs post-pandemic. This made the advert culturally relevant, and it also ensured there was a huge audience who could personally relate to the story. For those who haven’t partaken in The Great Quit, there’s the humour. Once you start watching, there’s no turning away. 

02. Set Fire to Your Hair

When Metro Trains released Dumb Ways to Die in 2012, they probably didn’t expect the video to rack up 269 million views, spawn a series of follow-up videos, inspire numerous parodies, and start a video game; culminating in a franchise which would eventually be bought in 2021 for $2.25 million AUD. 

This three-minute video introduces a number of acts that can obviously prove fatal, but only the last forty seconds focuses on train-specific incidents. Accompanied by an original song, which was released as a single, the video animates these deaths in a non-graphic manner which makes it suitable for people of all ages while still conveying urgency. While the video was criticised by some, Melbourne claimed that it led to a 20% reduction in near-miss train incidents.  

03. O Fortuna

Specsavers have long used the hilarity factor in their adverts, putting people in a range of bizarre or humiliating situations all because they “should’ve gone to Specsavers.” One of their most popular adverts to date aired in 2010 and parodied an existing advert created by fragrance company Lynx (also marketed as Axe) in 2006. 

The opening of The Specs Effect is nearly identical to the Lynx advert, showing women running through a jungle and beach toward a man who is spraying himself liberally with deodorant. The variation comes late in the advert, when the man puts on a pair of large red glasses which instantly turns the crowd away from him. 

Specsavers poked fun at an advert that had courted criticism, turning it on its head to avoid similar backlash. Joining in on an existing joke has been successful for other brands, and Specsavers proved that when it is done right a parody can become more iconic than the original. 

04. Yeah

Amazon have created a number of wildly successful adverts in the past, but one of their most popular – and funniest – is Before Alexa. Starring American actresses Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, the advert premiered in 2020 during the Super Bowl. This humorous take on life before Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa received 61 million views, unsurprising considering the views Super Bowl adverts typically receive – in 2020, 150 million people watching. 

The humour in the advert is what kept bringing audiences in after the game had ended. While the assistant only features at the start and end of the advert, throughout is the reinforcement that using Amazon’s product makes everyday tasks easier than ever before. 

05. Karate

It’s rare for a new company to enjoy the overnight success story that Dollar Shave Club got in 2012, especially when their marketing campaign was limited to one video that unexpectedly went viral. Our Blades Are F**king Great crashed the company’s website an hour after it aired due to the unprecedented volume of traffic. Within 48 hours, the company had over 12,000 orders. Not bad. 

The key to the video’s success is the simple marketing premise of problem and solution. Dollar Shave Club addresses the common problems for people looking to buy razors, then offered their product up as the solution. A simple premise, yet this video went viral. Why? Because it’s funny! Using deadpan humour, tongue-in-cheek jokes, the random appearance of a bear, and bleeped language, it grabbed attention from the start and kept its audience hooked until the very end. 

Content Worth Gold

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