The article ‘The Impact of Violent Humour on Advertising Success: A Gender Perspective’ written by Kunal Swani, Marc Weinberger and Charles Gulas is a research article based on advertising. I found the article while searching for media related content and found it intriguing to write an analysis about it. The article is based on the content of advertising, which uses different techniques to attract the audience. Recently humour is mixed with violence to gain the attention of an audience and studies have been carried out to find out its effects on both genders. It is a research article, which also states that when tested on men, it received positive response than the female audience did.
Advertising has become a source of attracting people’s attention and one of the major ways to sell a product or make people aware of their service. Many research studies found that almost twelve percent of the ads contained violence and fifty three percent of ads had humour mixed with violence. The authors of the article also mentioned that in 2009 Super Bowl, as much as seventy percent ads appeared which violence and humour had combined. Humour according to the authors is difficult to define and every philosopher, thinker, and psychologists have contributed a great deal in defining the term. Disparagement is the most used kind of humour, which is also seen in the works of Aristotle, Freud, and Hobbes. It has always been said that too much time watching violence in television can lead to violent behavior in the audience. Many people have the perception that mixing humour with violence sends a message that violence is something that should not be taken seriously. At the end of the twentieth century, only one-third of the advertisements contained violence and that was targeted only towards men, as they were the victims of humorous violence in the ads. Advertisements like Castrol, Coke Zero, Audi, Doritos, and Bud Light included violence and humour that included the victims as men.
Many studies were conducted and the question arose whether shock and violence benefited the companies into attracting the audience or not. Manchanda, Frankenberger, and Dahl while studying the topic noted that the shock factor in the HIV/AIDS ad attracted a large number of audiences and gained a lot of attention with short-term recall. With violence in the ad, it was more likely passed and shared on with other people so it definitely benefits the companies into promoting their product and services to the targeted audience.
There is also a difference between perceived humor and intended humor. It is not always that the audience directly links the humor with the product, which results in failed humor. This gets negative comments from the audience and the product is reputed as a bad brand. Humour and violence in an ad cannot be just put together by a swift but it includes some factors. The ad must present a situation that the rules and norms are being violated; the situation must send the message that it is gentle and kind and thirdly, both the situations must take place at the same time i.e. they must be linked together.
The article also includes the method of research that was used to conduct the studies of whether both male and female perceive the humour with violence ad in the same way or not. The targeted people that showed the result those women would perceive this kind of ad with less humour and would consider it not worthy of liking while the male gender found these ads more likeable filled a survey questionnaire.
The article was interesting and ways to understand. The topic of the article is not a common one that comes in the minds of the people so I read it with interest and agreed with most of the things written in it. Companies use violence with humour ads to attract the audience and it benefits them; but it was also intriguing to know that the same concept was perceived very differently by both the genders.
