Introduction

The media environment has changed dramatically in recent years. Traditional advertising
media such as TV, magazines and newspapers are losing their power on catching
consumers. Instead, online advertising, such as web banner, social media marketing, mobile
advertising are gaining power and growing rapidly. With the power of internet connections
and ubiquitous mobile devices, advertisers are forced to rethink and create on-line approach
practices to be going viral. Websites, on-line ads/videos, and blogs/bulletin boards are three
on-line media often being used by marketers to communicate their brand message.
Humorous advertising is a good tool to use in internet and mobile environments for going
viral. When advertisement makes audiences laugh, they are more likely to want to share it
with others. Thus, humorous appeals are the means by which marketers attempt to inform,
persuade and remind consumers, directly or indirectly, about the brands they market.
Every day people are exposed to a large amount of television advertisements. There are
thousands of products on the market and it would be interesting to find out why we respond
to certain advertisements and not to others. We thought that it could be interesting to
concentrate on humorous advertisements since they are a great part of advertising today.
Therefore the purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of humour.
Advertising could be used to make the target audience aware of the existence of a product
or service, and the benefits it confers to customers. Advertising is a part of the promotional
mix that also includes trade promotions, sales promotions, personal selling and sales
management. (Clow & Back, 2002).

Main Body
According to Fugate (1998), the frequency with which humor appears and the enthusiasm of
its supporters is not always justified by empirical measurement of results. Serious studies on
humor suggest that the nature of the product, the medium, target audience factors, the
communication goal, the type of message and the placement of the message all influence
cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses of consumers in the marketplace. In the
broader sense, controlling for these antecedents is only a partial solution to humor research
since it is difficult to precisely define what humor is or is not.
He proposes that sense of humor is multidimensional and that it contains at least the
following six dimensions.

1. Humor production.
2 .A sense of playfulness
3 .The ability to use humor to achieve social goals
4 .Personal recognition of humor
5 .Appreciation of humor
6 .Use of humor as an adaptive mechanism
Stern (1996) further claims that individual and cross-cultural differences may influence.
Determinations of what is funny humor, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder.
Industry wisdom has produced caveats such as making sure that funny material does not
divert attention from the message, using subtle rather than gross humor, relating humor to
the product and integrating it with the message, avoiding humor that makes fun of the
consumer, and being alert to humor's rapid wear-out. (ibid.)
According to Fatt (2002) humor is one of the criteria in awarding awards for the most
effective advertisements. However he continues, advertisers commonly make the mistake of
using humor just for the sake of using humor. (ibid.)
Businesses spend billions of dollars every year to create humorous prime time television
advertisements because advertisement practitioners believe that humor is an effective way
to gain attention in advertisements. Fatt agrees with Weinberger & Gulas that humor used in
magazine, television and radio advertisements has a positive effect on audience attention.
Humorous advertisements generally outperform non-humorous advertisements in four
categories: initial attention, sustained attention, projected attention, and overall attention.
However, there is a difference in effectiveness between related and unrelated humor.
Humor related directly to the advertised product works more effectively than unrelated
humor.
Thus, simply inserting humor into a given advertisement is unlikely to have the same impact
on attention as using a more integrated humor treatment. (Fatt, 2002)
Weinberger and Spotts found that humorous advertising is more attractive than nonhumorous advertising and increases the brand memory of consumers, making consumers
feel good by being persuasive. In addition, Speck believed that different types of humorous
ads lead to different psychological reactions and produce various advertising effects. This
study used a method proposed by Li to classify humorous ads into: affectively humorous
ads, cognitively humorous ads, and socially humorous ads.

Conclusion
Humor is a great tool for managements to use in advertising, there are strong benefits such
as it attracts attention and makes people remember the advertisement for a longer period of
time.
However, there are more or less appropriate types of humor that management should
consider when using humor in television advertising. Generally, all humor types are funny if
they succeed to make the viewers like them, but it seems like some types are more common
in television and they are easier to succeed with. We have found some general broad
statements about how different types of humor can be described. It is generally hard to find a
type of humor that attracts a large amount of people, but there is a primary type of humor for
everyone. Based on our findings surprise humor tends to be the best type of humor to use in
television advertising if it succeeds to surprise. This is because surprise humor attracts most
attention of the seven different humor types and it makes us stay in front of the television.