Mastering The Message: Content Series
The creative content studio from the Financial Times
Last month, Aldi released its new caterpillar-themed #Cuthparty advertising and social media campaign. The main video features caterpillars from rival supermarkets enjoying a party together, with M&S’s Colin turning up to ruin the celebrations – resulting in a comedy scrap. It’s the budget supermarket’s latest play in a two-year campaign making light of the legal action M&S took in 2021 to “protect its intellectual property” and, like lots of good comedy dramas, it has me completely hooked on watching the campaign play out.
While Aldi has built a brand persona on humorous marketing, adopting levity into brand content is not a new technique. Santander’s brand partnership with comedy duo Ant and Dec saw them creating the “Bank of AntandDec” content series, with storylines centred around suggestions for funny financial solutions. Swedish bank Klarna released its “I wish I’d bought it with Klarna” series, which presented amusing events involving online shopping disasters.
And Innocent drinks recently announced the end of its non-dairy milk products with a witty press release thanking “all five” of its customers for buying the products.
The results speak for themselves. After Santander’s string of ads fronted by sports stars, Marketing Week reported that a bank-led customer survey resulted in its highest score ever, with 38 percent of consumers agreeing that the ads made them love the bank more. Aldi has also capitalised on the humorous approach, with purchase consideration increasing by 6.8 per cent, according to supermarket data.
So what makes humour so engaging? When we laugh, our brain releases the feel good chemical dopamine, resulting in increased happiness and stress relief, and jolting us into a new emotional state. Research also suggests that the feelgood factor helps us to retain the information we are consuming. A Pew Research Poll found that viewers of humorous news shows such as “The Daily Show” exhibited higher retention of news facts than those who got their news from newspapers.
Clearly there’s a place for humour, and some topics require more care than others, but I would love to see brands using it more, engaging with audiences through a universal and feelgood emotion to encourage the message to stick.
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