How many times can you laugh at the same joke?
A recipe for success in advertising—and especially in TV advertising—is entertainment with humor. And a well-executed punchline. If a commercial like that is shown to consumers thirty times, it gets annoying. By Theophil Butz, graphic designer, advertising agency owner, source of inspiration, and—for over a year and a half now—also a grumbler for *Werbewoche* readers. Please send relevant comments to [email protected].
Every year on New Year's Eve, the famous English sketch "Dinner for one" is broadcast on almost all television stations. Again and again one can smile about this excellent English humor. And one apparently likes to watch it again and again. The same goes for Laurel and Hardy's piano transport or the dance with the globe in Charly Chaplin's "Great Dictator ". Then there are the "Fine Food" spots from Coop, in which the guests wait for the host and chef, who is stuck in a breakdown with his old Peugeot, the food dictated via mobile phone by the host, and all's well that ends well. After watching it twice, you understand the complicated story. After watching four times, you realize, aha, it's about fine food, no not from Buitoni or Knorr, but from Coop. All further encounters with this yuppie group achieve boredom to the point of a "No, not again" effect. In this way, a good advertising story can become truculent and turn its effect into the negative. Of these "funny" commercials, there are a lot of even more recalcitrant ones: the Thomy tubes, the children's milk-slice refrigerators falling from the ceiling, and so on.
My theory: If you want to create TV advertising with humor or wit, the "opportunity to see" must be reduced to two or three contacts at the most. If you ask at the regulars' table three days in a row: "Do you already know the joke about the Basler who wanted to become a Zurich citizen?", you'll be judged as a "Dubel". The same applies to advertising messages. Unless the joke is so ingenious that you want to see it more often. Like the Evian Babies, the Levis commercials or "Dinner for one". But the latter is only broadcast once a year. The be-all and end-all of successful advertising is continuity. But if the concept is continuously communicated with the same punch line, the desired effect tips over into the negative.
In my past advertising activity, we produced funny TV spots with "Flip" (Marti Schenkel) for EPA. The EPA jokes were very successful. However, we invented a cheap production system, so we aired each spot no more than four times. So every week a new gag. There are enough examples that this principle with frequently changing spots is better received by the audience. Unless you produce such a banal spot as the Fischer-Bettwarenfabrik Wädenswil, which can only be seen as good again with a lot of irony.
My put up is that I have ventured to try grafting a new grape variety on some of our vines in Italy.
