What Comes After Funny?
Humor will always be a powerful tool for marketers, but it's time to re-think how brands must show up on the internet, and what creating "content" really entails.
“When you see that everyone is kind of doing this lowercase funny, sarcastic posting or outlandish slang-based advertisements, what happens is you have to continue to one-up it,” Mr. Cacace said. “The quality is kind of dropping across the board.”
from the NYT article If Every Brand Is Funny Online, Is Anything Funny?
6 years ago in 2017, Wendy’s revolutionized corporate social media and changed marketing in a very profound way. They were the first corporate brand to really embrace the lowercase, personification of branding, and they did it well. They didn’t half-ass it with corny burger puns, they really went out there and started roasting people on the internet and shitposting with no restraint. Fast forward to 2023 and every brand, and every social media manager in the world has jumped on this obvious tactic to take their own shot at being funny. Even your local florist or DUI attorney is probably shitposting on their social media accounts.
The pressure to speak Gen Z’s language and be a digitally native brand has taken a once novel approach to marketing and made it saturated, played out, and annoying. There was a really good “why?” for Wendy’s, the broader intent of their approach was sparked through genuine innovation and it gave people a reason to buy into it and tune in. Now, however, it feels cheap and purposeless; a blatant attempt to tap into a proven, winning formula and optimize for engagement. The “why?” is gone.
This is just one example and in my opinion, a telltale sign that we’ve reached a critical inflection point in how brands decide to show up. The baseline quality for most social media content in corporate marketing is 🌽 cornball 🌽 shit like what you see above, which means there’s a real opportunity to be bolder, more adventurous, and daring. The biggest advantage you can have as a marketer is being authentic, differentiated, and GOOD. You probably think that’s the most basic, generic, platitudinous statement ever but really I think a lot of people forget the basics of marketing sometimes. If you’re in a meeting and hear a novel idea or listen to a new approach for content and your first thought is, “Well which other companies executed that successfully?” You’ve already lost the plot. If your only preference for the future is stuff people have already done then why bother? Stop copying other people and break into a space no one is playing in.
One of the more pernicious problems affecting a lot of the creative you see in the world is characterized by a lack of focus. You gotta pick one audience, one part of the marketing funnel, and nail a concept that achieves your goal. The most important thing is not getting bogged down with 7 different business objectives and trying to check off boxes for audiences you want to speak to. What are you trying to do with your advertisement? Are you trying to be funny? Are you trying to be aspirational? Are you trying to make people feel inspired? Take your emotional objective and place it at the very top as your driving creative principle. If you’re a marketer now, you’re basically just making stuff that will eventually live on social media, which means you are a content creator. You’re also competing against other content creators who aren’t distracted by any other goal besides making stuff that’s as entertaining or engaging as possible. Which is why it’s so hard to actually break into people’s algorithms. You can’t half-ass it and constantly water down your ideas when there are other people out there who are full-sending it! No one wants to watch an ad. Period. The best kind of ads are ones that barely announce themselves. You don’t want people to feel like they just wasted their time by interacting with or watching your content.
This was a perfectly executed commercial from Kim Kardashian’s Skims. They doubled down on humor and sex appeal to sell a product for a brand that’s all about looking your best. It’s exactly the kind of corporate surrealism that resonates with people today, who are starved of advertising that dares to be risqué, that dares to be different. It’s an idea that would be flat-out canned at 99% of most big companies, which is what makes it so refreshing to see. As an advertiser, you’re almost like a standup comedian who’s telling a joke about an extremely controversial subject. A shitty standup comedian will get in trouble, but the one that makes everyone laugh at the end is the one that knows how to craft a proper joke. In the same vein, the marketer who can make people watch an ad without them feeling like they’re being advertised to is the one who knows how to actually reach people in a genuine way. Andy Warhol once said, “Art is what you can get away with.” An artful ad does just that, it gets away with being an advertisement without annoying someone. At the end of the day, you are trying to create propaganda to slowly massage your brand into the viewer’s brain and induce them to purchase your product or service. There is an art to it. The Michelin Guide doesn’t shoehorn in a call to action about buying tires when they tell you to eat at the French Laundry. They spread the gospel subtly and subconsciously, but the reason they are able to imprint the Michelin name in your mind is that there’s genuine passion behind the star system. It’s hard to make good advertisements and good art when money is your only driving force. Without a good why, without a good mission, there’s no point.
This Nike ad is one of the greatest commercials ever made (to me). My high school football coach used to play this before every game, and we would all walk away feeling inspired, ready to leave it all on the field. That is the kind of overarching objective you should have when making a top-of-the-funnel, awareness-driving advertisement. This ad leaves you with a certain emotional feeling that really speaks to Nike’s core mission statement, which is “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” There’s no tie into product and there’s really no way to even measure how effective it was, but that might also be what makes it so good. Lower-funnel, conversion-driving ads are harder to make without actually just being very squarely about the product, so there isn’t much creative room to do much else besides showcasing it in a very commercially driven way. However, if your brand is going to enter the arena and start “creating content” then there has to be a basic understanding of your audience and why people actually watch or engage with things. Your content needs to have a “why” that goes beyond and transcends business goals.
Why is Jacquemus considered one of the best marketers in the world right now? From my perspective, his content has one giant mission statement more important than anything else, which is to create really fucking good visuals that anyone can appreciate, regardless if you want to buy his stuff. You can tell that there’s a higher purpose, a purely artistic purpose, that drives him and his brand. Even the most commercial content he makes to push sales is dope!
Each one of his posts is a work of art. At the end of the day, he’s selling a vision of beauty through his brand. It makes people stop their scroll to admire and have a refuge to escape into. Another thing that absolutely works to his advantage is that the brand’s account blurs the line between being a personal diary and business. He doubled down on a key insight about social media behavior, which is that people prefer to interact with individuals vs brands. That’s why his engagement rates are through the roof, because people actually look forward to what he’s going to post next and feel like they’re a friend of the brand in a way. Though that level of intimacy is impossible for most companies, the point still remains about having an attitude and approach to content like an actual content creator or artist. Your channel needs to have a raison d’aitre that serves a broader creative purpose beyond the brand’s immediate revenue goals. On another note, his marketing budget must be significantly smaller than that of big corporate brands considering he pulled in about €220M Euros in 2022, the difference is he knows how to do more with less. The reason he and his team are successful is that they’ve created an approach to advertising that places aesthetics and beauty above all else. People want to see their posts because they’re providing something that other content creators aren’t, which is gorgeous imagery. Not every post needs to be a blatant attempt to drive sales, sometimes it should just be a cool post; once in a while I’ll check their story and it’ll just be a nice view of Lake Como or a hand holding an ice cream cone against a nice backdrop. This is something that advertisers and marketers have to come to terms with now. For Gen Z and now Gen Alpha, YouTube is their TV, and social media content is one of their main forms of entertainment. We are competing against everyone for attention and if your brand is posting on social media, you’re not just competing against other brands. Target is competing for the same eyeballs that Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, Druski, Emma Chamberlain, or a big meme account is competing for. Individuals, media companies, and brands are all playing the game as equals now, and for the most part, regular content creators are much better positioned for success because that’s who your target audience wants to engage with. The game has changed, we’re not forced to watch ads anymore in the same way people were pre-internet. So what comes after funny? Nothing, humor will always be an important marketing lever, but the bar is being raised constantly and if you want to make content, but you’re not trying to hit the mark the same way your favorite comedian is, you’re not on the right track.