Besides being informational, advertising has to be attractive, able to draw and keep customers' attention. The main goal of advertising is to communicate with its companies' customers. Today, when TV broadcasting is overloaded by advertising information and advertising time reaches up to 15 minutes from every broadcasting hour, this goal becomes even more crucial to achieve. Advertising ability to attract attention has also become crucial. If advertisements are not able to stand out of the crowd and draw people's attention they will not communicate companies' information to them and will turn out into the lost investment. Advertisers, often times, use humor for making ads more entertaining. Some Funny commercials are focused on attracting and keeping customers' attention. Those are meant to entertain viewers' audience and increase the level of their awareness.
Even though funny commercials and advertising humor are really able to attract customers' attention, ad men do not have a strictly positive view on them. Without a doubt, funny commercials are mighty popular among the advertisements' consumers. Although, besides entertaining those funny commercials have to fulfill their advertising and sale goals. Many funny commercials are awarded on the festivals of creative advertising, though this fact does not make them more fit for business promotion. It is a belief of some ad men that advertising has to promote products instead of entertaining its audience.
Not all products can be advertised with the aid of humor and not all advertising is fit for it. Humor in B2B advertising, for example, is inappropriate. For, such advertisements' consumers are much more interested to find there some products' specifics, prices, diagrams, etc. Generally, they are not looking for fun in the B2B ads.
On the other hand, properly designed funny commercials can be very effective. In consumer advertising besides informational, there has to be an entertaining aspect. It is essential to create in customers positive emotions toward the products, to establish an emotional bond with them and humor is a unique tool for it. Comedy in advertising, if only the humor of it is relevant, clear and exquisite, is able to differentiate your trailer from all others and help your consumers to remember it. Furthermore, funny commercials' 'life' goes on long after they are not run on TV anymore. People record many advertising funny commercials on tapes or CDs, make them a part of their home entertainment and watch them on the Internet. Hit lines from some funny commercials become by-words, enter every day people's life and go on evoking in them some associations with the advertised products. This greatly increases the overall advertising effect.
Using comedy in advertising, it is important to remember that a humor has to stay relevant and not gross. Otherwise, it can be distasteful to people and will create for the advertised products and companies a negative image. The humor has to be easy to understand. If a joke needs a further explanation, it will not work.
Those are some of the main clues of using humor in advertising