Humour In Safety Campaigns Research
Influence of media context on humorous advertising effectiveness
By Kapil Khandeparkar & Abhishek
"Marketing literature provides different typologies to classify humor, which can be divided into two broad categories. The first category consists of technique typologies or technique-oriented classifications, which describe different forms of humor according to the technique used in the advertisement such as pun or slapstick (Berger, 1976; Buijzen and Valkenburg, 2004). The working of different forms of humor can be explained by domain-specific theories, which addresses narrow sources of humor such as joke (Raskin, 1985) or irony (Giora, 1995). However, these theories are incapable of explaining humor across multiple domains (McGraw and Warren, 2010) which restricts their usage. The second category consists of content typologies, which focus on the way humor is experienced by explaining the underlying mechanisms that evoke perception of humor (Speck, 1991). In this category, Speck’s (1991) humorous message taxonomy is the most widespread classification of humor, which is used to theoretically explain the mechanism in different humor types (Schwarz et al., 2015). Researchers have adopted Speck’s classification of humor as it not only describes the technical processes leading to humor experiences but also addresses the underlying psychological processes."
"Speck (1991) classified humorous processes into three types: incongruity resolution (IR), arousal safety (AS) and humorous disparagement. In Speck’s taxonomy, the basic underlying mechanism about processing of humor can be described as a two-stage model (Alden et al., 2000). The first stage consists of a surprise or a puzzle generated by an unexpected element in the advertisement. The second stage generates humor when the consumers resolve the ambiguity to understand the implicit meaning depicted in the advertisement. Resolution of the uncertainty leads to a pleasurable sensation, which creates laughter. Though all the three types of humor follow this two-stage model, it is adopted differently in each of the three cases."
"IR humor is characterized by interruption, perceptual contrast, and playful confusion (Speck, 1991), thus, causing incongruity in the minds of consumers. This often leads to cognitive uncertainty involving the characters in the advertisement, resulting into a surprise, which consumers want to resolve. When consumers are able to resolve the incongruent situation presented in the advertisement, they have a more favorable view toward the advertisement as they perceive it as humorous."
"AS is an affective mechanism related to relief theory (Spielmann, 2014). This humor type requires a stress-inducing stimulus leading to an affective uncertainty followed by a safety judgment that negates the danger posing to the characters in the advertisement (Speck, 1991). In the first stage, AS humor consists of an affective uncertainty involving the characters in the advertisement, leading to a feeling of stress. For AS humor to be effective, the advertisement stimulus has to be mildly disrupting or include a sentimental image leading to empathy or relief (Beard, 2008). Humor is achieved from a sense of relief when this stress is evaluated to be safe or inconsequential (Rothbart, 1976). AS responses generally involve an outpouring of sentiment or goodwill for people (or personified creatures) that we consider cute, warm, friendly, or familiar (Speck, 1991). These ads are capable of generating an emotional response toward characters featuring in the advertisement."
"Humorous disparagement is the third mechanism of humor described by Speck (1991). This humor type stems from disparagement theories, which hold that humor is fundamentally social and it operates in a social context."
Promoting Public Health Messages: Should We Move Beyond Fear-Evoking Appeals in Road Safety?
By Ioni M. Lewis, Barry Watson, Katherine M. White, & Richard Tay
"Road traffic injury is one of the most significant global public health issues of the 21st century. The extent to which negative, fear-evoking messages represent effective persuasive strategies remains a contentious public and empirical issue. Nevertheless, negative, fear-based appeals represent a frequently used approach in Australasian road safety advertising."
"Many public health campaigns use fear (or threat) as a persuasive strategy with the aim of producing specific changes in attitudes, intentions, and/or behaviors. Within Australian public health campaigns, road safety is particularly renowned for its use of graphic, threat-based appeals. Typically, these advertisements depict graphic crash scenes as resulting from unsafe and illegal driving behavior(s) such as speeding and drink-driving. These appeals aim to evoke a negative emotional response in the audience, namely fear, that is expected to motivate compliance with the message’s recommendations (i.e., persuasion)."
"These findings suggest that appeals that aim primarily to evoke fear might not be the most effective means of persuading drivers to adopt safer attitudes and behaviors. However, somewhat contrary to these findings is evidence that suggests emotional health messages are more effective than rational or informational-type appeals. This support for the effectiveness of emotional messages has been found for health campaigns addressing various issues including AIDS/HIV and road safety."
"Consistent with this suggestion, the use of positive emotions, including humor and joy, is effective in gain- ing attention, in particular the attention of individuals who might have considered themselves as being overly familiar with a campaign. In addition, positive emotions, including empathy and com- passion, might help individuals to reframe and reconsider issues that they might have felt as being not particularly relevant to their lives. Within the road safety context, after many years and many campaigns relying on negative, fear-inducing appeals, it is possible that individuals have tired of this approach. The introduction of more appeals to positive emotions such as humor might help to renew interest in road safety messages. Presently, however, there is limited theoretical and empirical research pertaining to the use of humor in health campaigns. Most of what is known about the persuasive effects of humor is based on commercial advertising as opposed to health campaigns, and the extent to which research findings can be generalized is questionable."
"More specifically, participants identified emotion as important for attracting a viewer’s attention, increasing the likelihood that the advertisement and its message would be remembered and preventing the advertisement from being boring."
"There needs to be some sort of connection there; otherwise you’re not going to do anything about it; you’re not going to remember it next time you’re out on the road."
"Concerns raised regarding the use of negative emotion indicated a belief that such appeals were less effective nowadays because viewers have become numbed to shock and/or have become tired of there being too much shock."
"The second shortcoming associated with negative appeals pertains to the growing discontent with their continued use in road safety campaigns. Confirming our predictions, participants indicated growing tired of such negative appeals and feeling numbed to “shock tactic advertising.” This growing discontent should not be taken lightly, as it might have diminished the persuasive ability of negative appeals. Specifically, individuals might have tired of such appeals to the extent that they no longer attend to the messages and/or feel that the road safety issue is overly familiar. Given that it is unlikely that individuals are likely to be persuaded by messages that they no longer are attending to, this poses a serious con- cern for the effectiveness of negative appeals."
The influence of humour strength and humour-message relatedness on ad memorability: A Dual Process Model
By Thomas W. Cline & James J. Kellaris
"Although some of what is currently known about humor’s effects on advertising response may be equivocal, a strong case can be made for humor’s impact on attention. Weinberger et al. (1995) find evidence that humor is directly linked to attention and recognition. Spotts, Weinberger, and Parsons (1997) show that humor enhances initial attention, aids brand recall, and holds attention."
"Research shows that a positive mood can facilitate recall (Isen 1987) and lead to greater receptiveness to persuasive communications (Galizio and Hendrick 1972)."
"Humor is an ad feature that is likely to induce good moods."
The Humorous Message Taxonomy: A Framework for the Study of Humorous Ads
By Paul Surgi Speck
"Humor often involves incongruity. Incongruity occurs whenever (1) two or more elements in a stimulus field cannot be assimilated using a single processing schema or (2) when the entire stimulus event does not comport with one’s expectations regarding that event."
"In general, there are two kinds of explanations for the role of incongruity in humor: one-stage incongruity theories and two-stage incongruity-then- resolution theories. Both theories start with the experience of discrepancy or surprise, but while incongruity theories emphasize interruption, perceptual contrast, and playful confusion, incongruity-then-resolution theories emphasize insight, reintegration, and the discovery of meaning."
Beyond reviews of road safety mass media campaigns: Looking elsewhere for new insights
By Barry Elliott
"We know that emotion focuses attention, has a major effect on what we remember and is more closely linked to behaviour than our cognitions."
"Instead of fighting the availability heuristic, campaign planners could consider ways of creating what Beattie refers to as ‘flashbulb’ memories which are hard-wired memories designed for human survival and shaped by evolution."
"Campaign planners ought to consider how to generate flashbulb memories which are not necessarily shocking but meaningful, personally relevant and consequential."
"Emotion not only shapes our unconscious r eactions; it also feeds into, shapes and colours our conscious thought. When watching television we usually want to be entertained and we monitor the stimuli and, if positive, we pay more attention. This has implications for road safety mass media campaigns. Effective advertising for an issue (e.g., drink driving) or product or brand establishes feelings, associations and memories in relation to the issue/product/brand etc. These associations will only influence our behaviour if they come to mind when we think about the issue/product/brand."
"Emotion helps to stimulate and guide our attention and reinforce associations. All of this goes on below the level of consciousness; the learning is incidental and occurs via repetition of exposure to the advertising. The role of road safety communication campaigns can be to establish new associations for the behaviour in question (e.g., drink and drive = lose your job). A positive emotional response and repetition will increase the likelihood the new association will become part of memory about drink driving and if these come to mind they are more likely to influence behaviour. Alternatively, road safety advertising can reinforce existing associations thereby ensuring the needed associations are more likely to come to mind and so influence behaviour."
"Emotions not only drive our unconscious reactions, they also determine what becomes conscious by feeding into, shaping and controlling conscious thought. What we pay attention to we remember and so it influences the content of our brain: what we attended to and remembered in the past influences what we will pay attention to in the future. Attention and memory create a feedback system. Ads must first gain our attention if they are to be remembered. Since emotion plays a big role in directing our attention, effective ads must evoke emotion in us, either positive or negative."
"Humans are programmed to seek out the positive and avoid the negative. Accordingly, we need to like the ad."
"These findings suggest that, in developing road safety communication, we need to maximise the likelihood of viewers empathising with the situation and the characters so as to encourage them to share the emotional experience of the communication."
"Tracking studies around the world (mostly of ‘commercial’ TV advertisements) consistently reveal that advertising that creates a positive emotional response performs better than ads that do not."
"To be effective, a road safety TV commercial first has to be noticed; next it has to be remembered, not necessarily as an ad, but as associations with the road safety behaviour being advocated. Advertisements that work are advertisements that are liked, i.e., they are noticed more, remembered more and these memories are available to influence action."
By Kapil Khandeparkar & Abhishek
"Marketing literature provides different typologies to classify humor, which can be divided into two broad categories. The first category consists of technique typologies or technique-oriented classifications, which describe different forms of humor according to the technique used in the advertisement such as pun or slapstick (Berger, 1976; Buijzen and Valkenburg, 2004). The working of different forms of humor can be explained by domain-specific theories, which addresses narrow sources of humor such as joke (Raskin, 1985) or irony (Giora, 1995). However, these theories are incapable of explaining humor across multiple domains (McGraw and Warren, 2010) which restricts their usage. The second category consists of content typologies, which focus on the way humor is experienced by explaining the underlying mechanisms that evoke perception of humor (Speck, 1991). In this category, Speck’s (1991) humorous message taxonomy is the most widespread classification of humor, which is used to theoretically explain the mechanism in different humor types (Schwarz et al., 2015). Researchers have adopted Speck’s classification of humor as it not only describes the technical processes leading to humor experiences but also addresses the underlying psychological processes."
"Speck (1991) classified humorous processes into three types: incongruity resolution (IR), arousal safety (AS) and humorous disparagement. In Speck’s taxonomy, the basic underlying mechanism about processing of humor can be described as a two-stage model (Alden et al., 2000). The first stage consists of a surprise or a puzzle generated by an unexpected element in the advertisement. The second stage generates humor when the consumers resolve the ambiguity to understand the implicit meaning depicted in the advertisement. Resolution of the uncertainty leads to a pleasurable sensation, which creates laughter. Though all the three types of humor follow this two-stage model, it is adopted differently in each of the three cases."
"IR humor is characterized by interruption, perceptual contrast, and playful confusion (Speck, 1991), thus, causing incongruity in the minds of consumers. This often leads to cognitive uncertainty involving the characters in the advertisement, resulting into a surprise, which consumers want to resolve. When consumers are able to resolve the incongruent situation presented in the advertisement, they have a more favorable view toward the advertisement as they perceive it as humorous."
"AS is an affective mechanism related to relief theory (Spielmann, 2014). This humor type requires a stress-inducing stimulus leading to an affective uncertainty followed by a safety judgment that negates the danger posing to the characters in the advertisement (Speck, 1991). In the first stage, AS humor consists of an affective uncertainty involving the characters in the advertisement, leading to a feeling of stress. For AS humor to be effective, the advertisement stimulus has to be mildly disrupting or include a sentimental image leading to empathy or relief (Beard, 2008). Humor is achieved from a sense of relief when this stress is evaluated to be safe or inconsequential (Rothbart, 1976). AS responses generally involve an outpouring of sentiment or goodwill for people (or personified creatures) that we consider cute, warm, friendly, or familiar (Speck, 1991). These ads are capable of generating an emotional response toward characters featuring in the advertisement."
"Humorous disparagement is the third mechanism of humor described by Speck (1991). This humor type stems from disparagement theories, which hold that humor is fundamentally social and it operates in a social context."
Promoting Public Health Messages: Should We Move Beyond Fear-Evoking Appeals in Road Safety?
By Ioni M. Lewis, Barry Watson, Katherine M. White, & Richard Tay
"Road traffic injury is one of the most significant global public health issues of the 21st century. The extent to which negative, fear-evoking messages represent effective persuasive strategies remains a contentious public and empirical issue. Nevertheless, negative, fear-based appeals represent a frequently used approach in Australasian road safety advertising."
"Many public health campaigns use fear (or threat) as a persuasive strategy with the aim of producing specific changes in attitudes, intentions, and/or behaviors. Within Australian public health campaigns, road safety is particularly renowned for its use of graphic, threat-based appeals. Typically, these advertisements depict graphic crash scenes as resulting from unsafe and illegal driving behavior(s) such as speeding and drink-driving. These appeals aim to evoke a negative emotional response in the audience, namely fear, that is expected to motivate compliance with the message’s recommendations (i.e., persuasion)."
"These findings suggest that appeals that aim primarily to evoke fear might not be the most effective means of persuading drivers to adopt safer attitudes and behaviors. However, somewhat contrary to these findings is evidence that suggests emotional health messages are more effective than rational or informational-type appeals. This support for the effectiveness of emotional messages has been found for health campaigns addressing various issues including AIDS/HIV and road safety."
"Consistent with this suggestion, the use of positive emotions, including humor and joy, is effective in gain- ing attention, in particular the attention of individuals who might have considered themselves as being overly familiar with a campaign. In addition, positive emotions, including empathy and com- passion, might help individuals to reframe and reconsider issues that they might have felt as being not particularly relevant to their lives. Within the road safety context, after many years and many campaigns relying on negative, fear-inducing appeals, it is possible that individuals have tired of this approach. The introduction of more appeals to positive emotions such as humor might help to renew interest in road safety messages. Presently, however, there is limited theoretical and empirical research pertaining to the use of humor in health campaigns. Most of what is known about the persuasive effects of humor is based on commercial advertising as opposed to health campaigns, and the extent to which research findings can be generalized is questionable."
"More specifically, participants identified emotion as important for attracting a viewer’s attention, increasing the likelihood that the advertisement and its message would be remembered and preventing the advertisement from being boring."
"There needs to be some sort of connection there; otherwise you’re not going to do anything about it; you’re not going to remember it next time you’re out on the road."
"Concerns raised regarding the use of negative emotion indicated a belief that such appeals were less effective nowadays because viewers have become numbed to shock and/or have become tired of there being too much shock."
"The second shortcoming associated with negative appeals pertains to the growing discontent with their continued use in road safety campaigns. Confirming our predictions, participants indicated growing tired of such negative appeals and feeling numbed to “shock tactic advertising.” This growing discontent should not be taken lightly, as it might have diminished the persuasive ability of negative appeals. Specifically, individuals might have tired of such appeals to the extent that they no longer attend to the messages and/or feel that the road safety issue is overly familiar. Given that it is unlikely that individuals are likely to be persuaded by messages that they no longer are attending to, this poses a serious con- cern for the effectiveness of negative appeals."
The influence of humour strength and humour-message relatedness on ad memorability: A Dual Process Model
By Thomas W. Cline & James J. Kellaris
"Although some of what is currently known about humor’s effects on advertising response may be equivocal, a strong case can be made for humor’s impact on attention. Weinberger et al. (1995) find evidence that humor is directly linked to attention and recognition. Spotts, Weinberger, and Parsons (1997) show that humor enhances initial attention, aids brand recall, and holds attention."
"Research shows that a positive mood can facilitate recall (Isen 1987) and lead to greater receptiveness to persuasive communications (Galizio and Hendrick 1972)."
"Humor is an ad feature that is likely to induce good moods."
The Humorous Message Taxonomy: A Framework for the Study of Humorous Ads
By Paul Surgi Speck
"Humor often involves incongruity. Incongruity occurs whenever (1) two or more elements in a stimulus field cannot be assimilated using a single processing schema or (2) when the entire stimulus event does not comport with one’s expectations regarding that event."
"In general, there are two kinds of explanations for the role of incongruity in humor: one-stage incongruity theories and two-stage incongruity-then- resolution theories. Both theories start with the experience of discrepancy or surprise, but while incongruity theories emphasize interruption, perceptual contrast, and playful confusion, incongruity-then-resolution theories emphasize insight, reintegration, and the discovery of meaning."
Beyond reviews of road safety mass media campaigns: Looking elsewhere for new insights
By Barry Elliott
"We know that emotion focuses attention, has a major effect on what we remember and is more closely linked to behaviour than our cognitions."
"Instead of fighting the availability heuristic, campaign planners could consider ways of creating what Beattie refers to as ‘flashbulb’ memories which are hard-wired memories designed for human survival and shaped by evolution."
"Campaign planners ought to consider how to generate flashbulb memories which are not necessarily shocking but meaningful, personally relevant and consequential."
"Emotion not only shapes our unconscious r eactions; it also feeds into, shapes and colours our conscious thought. When watching television we usually want to be entertained and we monitor the stimuli and, if positive, we pay more attention. This has implications for road safety mass media campaigns. Effective advertising for an issue (e.g., drink driving) or product or brand establishes feelings, associations and memories in relation to the issue/product/brand etc. These associations will only influence our behaviour if they come to mind when we think about the issue/product/brand."
"Emotion helps to stimulate and guide our attention and reinforce associations. All of this goes on below the level of consciousness; the learning is incidental and occurs via repetition of exposure to the advertising. The role of road safety communication campaigns can be to establish new associations for the behaviour in question (e.g., drink and drive = lose your job). A positive emotional response and repetition will increase the likelihood the new association will become part of memory about drink driving and if these come to mind they are more likely to influence behaviour. Alternatively, road safety advertising can reinforce existing associations thereby ensuring the needed associations are more likely to come to mind and so influence behaviour."
"Emotions not only drive our unconscious reactions, they also determine what becomes conscious by feeding into, shaping and controlling conscious thought. What we pay attention to we remember and so it influences the content of our brain: what we attended to and remembered in the past influences what we will pay attention to in the future. Attention and memory create a feedback system. Ads must first gain our attention if they are to be remembered. Since emotion plays a big role in directing our attention, effective ads must evoke emotion in us, either positive or negative."
"Humans are programmed to seek out the positive and avoid the negative. Accordingly, we need to like the ad."
"These findings suggest that, in developing road safety communication, we need to maximise the likelihood of viewers empathising with the situation and the characters so as to encourage them to share the emotional experience of the communication."
"Tracking studies around the world (mostly of ‘commercial’ TV advertisements) consistently reveal that advertising that creates a positive emotional response performs better than ads that do not."
"To be effective, a road safety TV commercial first has to be noticed; next it has to be remembered, not necessarily as an ad, but as associations with the road safety behaviour being advocated. Advertisements that work are advertisements that are liked, i.e., they are noticed more, remembered more and these memories are available to influence action."