Assessing the use and impact of humor on advertising effectiveness: a contingency approach.

More than $150 billion is spent on advertising in national media on an annual basis, with between 10% and 30% of that amount going for the placement of ads that are intended to be humorous (Weinberger et al. 1995). Despite the large allocation of resources to humorous advertising, a recent review of the literature revealed that though the pace of humor research has increased, relatively few of the studies have had a systematic conceptual framework (Weinberger and Gulas 1992).

We used two conceptual frameworks to examine humor, (1) a typology to categorize humor mechanisms and humor relatedness (Speck 1991) and (2) a variant of the product grids introduced in the marketing literature over the past 15 years (Rossiter, Percy, and Donovan 1991; Vaughn 1980, 1986; Wells 1988). Our goal was a conceptually based examination of advertising performance that accounts for the humor mechanism and humor relatedness in the context of the product/decision-making situation. The overall issue addressed in our study was whether advertisers' use of humor is justified by the influence of the humor on advertising performance. Specifically, by using content analysis of ads and the grouping of products in a classification grid to form the independent variables, and using Starch magazine readership scores as the dependent variables, we examined four questions:

1. Does the use of humor in advertising vary across product groups?

2. Does the effectiveness of humor in advertising vary across product groups?

3. Does the type of humor mechanism influence ad effectiveness, and does the effect vary across product groups?

4. Does the intentional relatedness (humor dominance, message dominance) of humor influence ad effectiveness differentially across product groups?

Background

Although the use of humor in advertising represents billions of dollars a year in spending, the efficacy of humor as a communication device remains uncertain. Sternthal and Craig (1973) first reviewed the humor literature related to advertising and reached some tentative conclusions based on the work conducted up to that time. Several dozen studies on humor in advertising have been conducted over the past 25 years, but understanding the impact of humor has been difficult. Because of the many influences from the humorous message, the nature of the product, audience factors, communication goals, humor relatedness, humor style, and humor placement, generalizations about the effects of humor have been rare (Weinberger and Gulas 1992). In the most recent review of the humor literature, Weinberger and Gulas suggested that although no one study can account for all the contingencies that affect humor the researchers must begin to incorporate the factors that appear to influence humor if progress is to be made in understanding its effects. We focus on two factors identified in previous research, humor mechanisms and intentional relatedness.