SEPTEMBER 3, 2025
WHY CONSUMERS SKIP LECTURES, STOP FOR LAUGHS.
Indie Agency News Team
The Super Bowl shouldn't be an anomaly—it should be Tuesday
The math is simple: 90% of consumers remember funny ads and 72% prefer humorous brands over competitors, according to Oracle research. Yet humor in advertising has declined consistently since 2002. When CMOs are starving for brand recall and competitive differentiation, what’s driving this disconnect between what works and what agencies actually deliver?
Rob Lewis and Travis Reeb from Good Conduct have thoughts on this. They believe the rise of performance marketing and Excel-driven metrics has led brands away from emotional connection—the very thing that built brands since the 1950s. But there’s hope for agencies willing to push back against the sea of bland.
The performance trap
Since 2002, Lewis explains, performance marketing has changed how we measure success. “When you start to lean into that whole aspect of everything, you start to lose the emotional connection that brand building has done since the advent of brand building,” he says.
The other culprit? The purpose boom. “Everybody got sucked into this virtue signaling,” Lewis notes. “Consumers just don’t really care about that anymore. But I think some marketers think that they do.”
It’s not that purpose is dead—it’s that performative versions of it are what audiences reject. As Lewis puts it: “When you’re outwardly creating messaging for the consumer, that doesn’t mean you can’t be entertaining.”
Beyond brand safety
The “off brand” conversation comes up constantly. Marketers say they need to be memorable, then reject entertaining concepts for being too risky. Reeb sees this differently: “Entertainment doesn’t have to equal humor. You can still be entertaining without leaning into humor.”
And when you do use humor? “Humor doesn’t equal Old Spice,” Reeb explains. “You really just should be leaning into who is your core audience. How do they respond and interact with your brand?”
Their approach: Be the gas while clients are the brakes. “Give us a box to play in, and we’re going to push you into different areas that maybe is slightly outside your comfort zone, and then you tell us where to rein back in.”
The indie advantage
For independent agencies, this represents a massive opportunity. “There’s a small indie agency renaissance,” Lewis says. “A lot of the best talent is moving to indies or opening their own shops. So I think we can speak to it a lot more authentically than the big agency who does it all.”
The key is leading with data that proves entertaining content works harder. “There’s literal science to surprise, and science to humor and recall,” Lewis notes. “Pushing back against this idea of blending into the sort of sea of blah out there is really how we’ve talked about it.”
When the shift happens
You’ll know humor is back when you stop seeing the same bland ads everywhere. “We’ll know when this fundamental shift happens when we turn on our streaming service or television and we’re consistently entertained by just the ads that are in those 32-second pods,” Lewis explains.
“People have a right to hate advertising when they’re getting served these RX ads and this slop. When it’s great, you don’t hate it during the Super Bowl. So let’s get to that on a more consistent basis.”
The Super Bowl shouldn’t be an anomaly—it should be Tuesday…
Original article here
Original Article Here