Entrepreneur Magazine: Humor in Marketing

For Ann Handley’s latest article in Entrepreneur Magazine, “4 Ways to Use Humor as a Marketing Tool,” we talked about how companies can take some simple approaches to entertain their audiences.

One of the key misconceptions about corporate humor is that it requires a huge budget.   All of the comedy YouTube videos that I’ve produced at IBM, Cisco and other freelance gigs have cost considerably less than our average production budget .  In some cases, we produced videos for less than 10% of the average marketing video budget, and received over 100 times more views than average.  Laughter  yields a significant ROI.

“Humor is effective in marketing because it humanizes and surprises. You can play it straight and write a blog post that clearly and emphatically states how your computer router can handle up to 6.4 terabits of data. Or you can get the point across and create something relatable, charming and (of course!) shareable. Cisco did this by positioning its decidedly impersonal router as the perfect “forever” gift for Valentine’s Day: “Nothing says I love you like the Cisco ASR 9000.” The former is boring. The latter infuses the message and brand with a human element that’s anything but expected.”

Avoid the overhead of the big agency and put the money into the right places — a strong comedy writer, director, editor, and of course actors with comedy skills.    It takes some legwork, but your customers and broader audience will be thrilled with the effort.

Read more in Ann’s article.