Nothing to laugh about: What happened to humor in pharma advertising?

When Bruno Abner and his creative team started working up campaign ideas for a new hormone-free contraceptive for women called Phexxi, they knew they wanted the message to be bold and unapologetic.

Then along came actress Annie Murphy. Best known for her comedic turn as Alexis Rose on the hit show “Schitt’s Creek,” Murphy opened the door to humor when McCann Health’s client Evofem Biosciences suggested her as a spokesperson.

Abner, the chief creative officer at McCann Health New Jersey, had already assembled an all-women creative team who were working on groundbreaking ways to stand out in the “stuck in the past” contraception category. The team had already settled on a “House Rules” frank-talking theme, but the addition of Murphy presented the opportunity to add humor to the evolving work.

“I didn’t want it to look like an ‘ad ad’ or a functional ad. I wanted people to watch it and have joy and a little bit of fun,” Abner said. The humor was purposeful in “making a message appealing and creating contrast in the pharma category. We tried to make it fun, entertaining, very bold and balanced. The humor helped balance the bold and punchiness of the ad.”

The result? A confident sex-positive humorous ad for Evofem and Phexxi that grabbed media headlines and consumer attention, while piling up ad industry creative awards and boosting bottom line sales.

It may not be a coincidence that Phexxi’s much-lauded campaign debuted at a time when Americans hadn’t had much to laugh about over the past few years. The Covid-19 pandemic, political turmoil, renewed social justice efforts to fight racism and raise health equity, climate change disasters piling up and a rollercoaster economy all added up to a pretty bleak backdrop.

Yet it may be just the right time. People still want humor from brands and marketing. Nine out of 10 people (91%) prefer brands to be funny, and 72% would choose a brand that uses humor over a competitor that doesn’t, according to Oracle’s recent Happiness Report.

So what’s stopping them? The bosses apparently — 95% of business leaders surveyed in the report said they are afraid of using humor in messages to customers.

Polly Wyn Jones

Whether it’s C-suite management or just resistance to trying something new, the decline of funny in advertising is apparent.

Only about one-third of all ads today use humor, the culminating effect of a long slow decline in funny trends in marketing over the past 20 years, said Polly Wyn Jones, global knowledge manager, creative, at Kantar marketing and data analytics company. And it’s even lower in healthcare where only about 20% of the ads are humorous.

Kantar research finds that about 7% of all advertising is considered very funny — versus just lighthearted or mildy humorous — but that percentage in healthcare again tracks much lower at just 3% falling into the very funny category.

Jones lamented not only the loss of levity, but also the potential to make stronger, better connections with consumers. Humor ranks as the top characteristic that makes people pay attention to ads, followed by music, storytelling and celebrities, in Kantar analytics.

“With so many different issues coming to the fore, people are a bit nervous about using humor,” she said. “It’s easier not to do it because then you don’t get it wrong. But what we’re suggesting is that you’re really missing a trick if you don’t do it because it’s the thing that’s most likely to make people receptive to your advertising.”

Still, pharma advertising is different, right? Maybe humor doesn’t have a place in pharma marketing as it might for consumer products like laundry detergent, car insurance and snack food brands. After all, many health conditions are serious and even non-life-threatening conditions carry emotional weight for the people living with them.

That’s not necessarily true, experts said. No category is absolutely off limits when it comes to humor in advertising, although the experts interviewed for this story did agree that judicious use and case-by-case consideration are important in healthcare and pharma marketing.

Adam Hessel, chief creative officer at Ogilvy Health, said humor in pharma can be a differentiator for pharma companies and brands and “it’s there for the taking” for agencies and brands bold enough to try.

“To me, comedy and entertainment make you sit back, take you for a little ride and say ‘ok, that was a great little moment,’” he said. “And it’s doable anywhere, right? It’s just about having the right brief, the right creative, and the right clients that understand this is really going to move the needle for your product in a good way.”

No one is arguing of course that all pharma advertising should be funny. Yet the appropriate time, place and message can strike funny bones and bolster brand recognition.

For FCB Health New York creatives working on a campaign for OTC stool softener Colace last year, humor became the emotional connection to consumers and patients.

“If you’re not triggering emotions and feelings through your communications, you’re probably not being heard by your audience,” said Melissa Jean Ludwig, VP and creative director at the agency. “With humor specifically, we really feel that it helps people broach topics that are sometimes difficult to talk about — in this case, pooping.”

Melissa Jean Ludwig

“There’s a right place and a right time for using humor, and if we can check both of those boxes, that opens the door for us to go for it,” she added.

The Colace campaign, anchored by a 30-second video ad, featured animated animals and objects such as pineapples and a watermelon acting out the upbeat original jingle that related difficulty pooping to humorous analogies — and drove a big response. It’s racked up almost 1.5 million combined video views across social media including YouTube, Ludwig said.

Erica Thwaites, FCB Health VP and creative director and co-creator on the Colace campaign, said humor through icons, imagery and songs can create more memorable work.

Erica Thwaites

“People don’t often want to remember the heavy stuff. So I think with humorous advertising there is a hope that people can hold onto and remember,” she said. “… I’m optimistic that the pendulum is swinging to the lighter side of things — or maybe I should say the non-pharma-y side of things? We’ve been hearing from clients who are saying ‘I don’t want this to feel like pharma.’”

Humor though is subjective. What may be funny to one person — or even 10,000 people — may not be funny to others. That means “doing the homework” to make sure the humor is on target and resonates appropriately, said Michelle Ziekert, Eversana Intouch executive creative director said.

Target audiences though will determine the level of acceptable humor, she said, for instance, the oncology category where disease may be incurable would seem to not be an appropriate place. And that may be true for pharma marketers, but as Ziekert noticed when doing research for oncology products, she found “tons of humor” from patients themselves on social media.

“The audience is allowed to do a lot of humor, but we as marketers are not able to encroach in that space,” she said. “There’s a line of respectability. If I myself have a condition, I may be able to make fun of that condition … There was one in cancer specifically with a person (on social media) talking about how much weight she lost as a side benefit that nobody talked about, and that may be funny when a person with cancer says it, but if we were to say that on TV, we’d be crossing a line that would show a lack of respect.”

Even treading carefully with humor though, pharma brands still need to be prepared for possible backlash.

“As a content creator, you need to be ready for all manner of responses and handle them respectfully. ‘We appreciate your feedback.’ …  But having done the homework is the entry fee,” Ziekert said.

The homework is testing, testing and more testing — with real people, patients, physicians, caregivers and more and in real-world channels as well before launching a campaign. Consultants such as Kantar have developed scientific methods to track reactions to humor at detailed level.

Facial coding, for instance, records the changing expressions on peoples’ faces as they’re watching an ad. Kantar also asks the viewers questions about the humor and emotions felt and syncs the data.

“We can check at which point, if you’ve made a joke, at what point are people actually finding it funny — and sometimes that may be a completely wrong point,” Jones said. “The idea is that the point where you see the rising and the bit where they find it funny that kind of needs to be around the brand. If you can get your brand in at those points as well, you’ve got a winning ad.”

Despite overall dropoffs in humor in general advertising and in pharma, there is some hope for the future and a return to more lightheartedness.

“The mood of the pandemic affected the mood of how creative was being evaluated both internally at agencies and by clients. It definitely put a certain kind of tone on the work that I think is going away,” Hessel said.

And considering the 20-year humor ad slide, it wasn’t just the pandemic that pushed more serious themes and tones.

“Even before the pandemic, we had a phase where there was a lot of heartfelt, purposeful advertising which became known as ‘sadvertising,’ It was all very emotional but sad at the same time, and I think people were beginning to reach a point where they really would like humor to come back,” Jones said.

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