Pitching Wu

Not that I’m saying that Obama isn’t a laugh a minute. . . but, I wanted to give everyone something a little more fun to think about this afternoon. For those of you who have spent time in the corporate environment, and particularly if you’ve had to travel, I wanted to point out a series of enjoyable ads that you may or may not have seen.

I don’t point these out to pimp the company because I care less about the company than I care about the order that my socks come out of the drier. But I point these out for your enjoyment and to make a quick point about humor.

Humor is difficult because people have very different ideas about what is funny. What one person finds hilarious, another finds stupid or even offensive. Thus, there is danger in using humor in advertising, because you can quickly turn off or anger part of your viewing audience. I, for one, am getting really sick of the “doofus white dude.”

Moreover, it is often difficult to find humor that relates to your product (e.g. consider how rarely the humor in beer commercials has anything to do with beer), and it is extremely difficult to find humor that people won’t get sick of after seeing it once (e.g. shock humor = bad idea).

But every once in a while, an ad or series of ads come along that do humor right. The jokes really speak to the target audience, they explain the need for the product, and they are subtlely hidden within the “story” and the “characters” so well that you don’t tire of re-hearing the commerical.

In that vein, I give you the following ads. In the first, we learn that our team needs someone to do a little business traveling. . .

Wu. . . the guru

Next, we learn that not all conference calls go as planned. . .

collaboration gone wrong

Finally, the gem in the series, a song that you all may recognize . . .

I Will Survive


:-)