To appeal to an audience through humor is very popular with video advertising these days… I say video because advertising reaches many types of devices, not just tv these days… But I think it’s safe to say that it started in the era when the tv was the sole provider of video advertising.
When exactly was humor first injected into television ads?
I know little about TV history, but it seems likely that humor was in TV ads from the very beginning, since they were written by the same ad agencies that wrote radio ads for decades before that, and someone must have noticed that humor was an effective way to make an ad memorable.
My memories of TV, such as they are, go back to the early 1960s, and humor was used in ads then.
That’s what I know for sure; my WAG is that Tony is right, and some TV advertisers have used humor since pretty much the beginning of commercial TV.
Ok, seems about right… here’s then two (very vague) follow up questions:
what changes in the ratio of humor ads to non-humor ads have you seen throughout the decades?
what of the ratio within internet video ads?
I don’t know the specifics, but there was an ad from, I believe the 60’s, featuring spaghetti that grew on trees.
Upon further review, it was not an ad. It was an April Fool’s prank, 1957.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ugSKW4-QQ
Another question: what is the ratio between humor-based ads and ads that are actually funny? I’d say it’s about 200:1.
Stan Freberg was instrumental in introducing comedic and sarcastic elements to TV advertising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Freberg#Advertising
Bob and Ray pioneered these ideas in their ad campaign for Piel’s Beer in the 1950’s.
I remember that guy. His kid had a report due on space.
Pretty much everything prior to Freberg was very tame or very small scale (secondary brands or regional ad coverage). He blew the lid off national-scale, big-name product comedy advertising, especially the genre where the ad pokes fun at the product or maker itself.
But he only got a B on it.
Jim Henson (yeah THAT Henson) did ads from 1957 to 1961 for Wilkinson INstant Coffee in the WAshington DC market. 10 second ads!
Moving over to CS.
Not only that, but many of the same entertainers who poked good natured fun at their sponsors (Bob Hope, Arthur Godfrey, etc.) moved their shtick directly to TV, so humor was in the ads from the very beginning.
Also, since a huge amount of early TV commercials were done live, there were inevitably screwupsthat had audiences howling. Advertisers quickly caught on to the concept that humor worked to their benefit.
My impression is that a new form of TV commercial humor – smarter, more surprising, more laugh-out-loud funny – emerged as a common device in various European countries (including the UK) maybe around the early 1980s, and influenced a portion of the US media industry by about the late 1990s, but is still more common in Europe to this day.
Ditto
Humor was already in use on radio when television started. Radio comedians were great pitchmen. There was a kind of gradual change in use of humor through the 60s. In the late 60s an Alka-Seltzer commercial about meatballsbecame phenomena. There were a variety of humours shaving cream commercials that would be parodied on television shows. The level of humor, and sometimes the sophistication was increasing.
As for how funny the funny commercials are, it’s hard to pass judgement on something like that. The pointless stupid ones don’t stay around long. The advertisers may tone down the humor to avoid offending their target market, and to avoid taking the attention off their product. But we do seem to have a lot of commercials probably intended to be humorous, but are actually just discordant. They are effective though, the intent was to get viewers to pay attention, and it’s an alternative to starting an ad with a foghorn.