The impact of culture on humorous ads
(A2019-10199)

AUTHORS

DRAGANA MEDIC, TOULOUSE CAPITOLE UNIVERSITY; JEAN MARC DECAUDIN, TOULOUSE CAPITOLE UNIVERSITY

KEYWORDS

ADS; HUMOR; CULTURE

ABSTRACT

"Humor has always been one of the most popular tools of creative advertising" (Lynch and Hartman 1968), an important communication component of advertising in numerous countries (Eisend 2009; Gulas and Weinberger 2006). The peculiarity of humor in advertising is that it targets a very heterogeneous audience simultaneously on the local and national even international scale. While it is universally practiced, practices of humor are nevertheless extremely varied and it use in advertising may require adaptation when communicating in different cultural contexts (Alden et al 1993). The proportion of international advertisements using humorous appeals can reach up to 50 % of TV advertising campaigns in US (Toncar,2001) and similar statistics can also be observed in other countries and other types of communication. Considering the huge and growing global advertising spending which represented $550 billion dollars in 2016 (McKinsey, Wilkofsky Gruen Associate: © Statista 2017), it appears essential to understand the stimulus of humor in ads tendency with a cross cultural comparison. The objective of this research is to understand the cultural differences in terms of humor in ads in France, China and United States and the influence of culture in the consumer perception and behavior.