Humor In Health Care Advertising

Humor In Health Care Advertising.
By Hans Kracauer – Executive Creative Director (Copy) – The Idea Factory

Although not unknown, humor in health care advertising is a relatively rare phenomenon.

There’s a reason for that.  Health is an innately serious subject.  The entire category of health care is seen as better approached in deadly earnest. Of course, there’s the other end of the spectrum.  Which entails pouncing on your audience and repeatedly hitting it over the head.

It’s a broad field.  Yet in surveying health care advertising, certain patterns emerge.

You can run advertising that seeks to inform — combining your message with an attitude of deep concern and bottomless compassion.   Or you can resort to scare tactics.  (Use our product or something absolutely unspeakable will happen to you.)  Then again — if it’s a parity product — you can just invent a point of difference.  Simply create a campaign which elevates that point of difference to a level of towering importance.  And let’s not forget that old standby — a benefits comparison. Take a competing product whose active ingredients are slightly different than yours.  Place the two products next to each other.  Then let the two sets of active ingredients fight it out.  Need I tell you which product will come out ahead?

Well, you get the idea.

Now we all know that the above strategies work.  And sometimes the specific nature of the health care product  may warrant them.  But just as often, there’s a much more effective approach. That approach is humor.

A Smarter Advertising Formula:  Laughter

Again — humor is not always appropriate.  But it’s a style of persuasion which can frequently yield  results that far exceed those of any other line of attack.

Properly executed, humor can really grab the attention of your audience. It has the capacity to disarm them while it entertains them.  And most important — it can deliver the message with resounding effectiveness and memorability.

At our agency, The Idea Factory, humor (sometimes over-the-top humor)  is often a living, breathing component in the selling strategy.

Let me give you an example.

One of our newest clients is Natricil.  Basically, Natricil is an all-natural, anti-microbial, anti-acne soap.  Obviously, teen-agers are our target audience. Should we  present them with advertising that features clinical evidence of Natricil’s efficacy?   Absolutely not!   We knew we’d be courting  massive apathy.  After all, our audience had  been exposed to this kind of stuff almost since infancy.  Instead we hit on a far more intriguing angle: the product as experienced by the enemy itself.   That’s right.  Natricil from the point of view of the pimple.

We went to work.  We created an animated TV commercial campaign starring a talking  pimple.  (It will also serve as a web-mercial.)  In addition, we  executed that same concept as a print campaign.

Since both the TV and print campaigns are still in production, let me synopsize.  Here’s the essence of the first TV spot.  We open on two pimples lying on their death beds.  One is an old pimple dying of natural causes.  The other is a young, fatally ill pimple who keeps fading throughout the spot. The old pimple asks the young pimple what brings him here.  The young pimple replies “You mean why is a young pimple like me lying here on his death bed?  Natricil.”  The young pimple then ticks off all the awesome killing properties of Natricil.  The commercial ends as the young pimple bitterly repeats the product’s positioning line in his dying breath.  “Natricil.  Deep Cleansing.  Deep Exfoliation.  Deep Relief.”  Then he vanishes.

The first print ad also features a dying pimple as the visual.  The headline over it reads “Confessions Of A Pimple.”   The entire ad is written in the first person.  Here’s how it opens.  “Oh how magnificent I was in the flower of my pimplehood!  I hung like a glowing red beacon on the face of my host.”  But then along came Natracil.  Its pimple killing properties are described in impressive detail. Our pimple’s halcyon days are now over.  He bids us a melancholy farewell with the product’s positioning line.  “Natricil.  Deep Cleansing.  Deep Exfoliation.  Deep Relief.”

And there you have it.  A dying pimple as a product spokesman.  Please note that notwithstanding the advertising’s tongue-in-cheek quality, Natricil’s message is delivered clearly and forcefully.  In a fashion that sticks in one’s memory.

Today’s consumers are a skeptical lot.  Charm and wit lowers resistance.  We contend that humor can be a far more effective form of persuasion than any dry, clinical approach.    If you’re a health care advertiser, you should seriously consider laughter as your weapon of choice.

Hans Kracauer is one of the two founders (Vincent Conti being the other) of The Idea Factory,.  Based in New York, The Idea Factory is an advertising agency that counts health care as one of its specialties.  In addition to  Natracil, the agency has recently created campaigns for DGU (a revolutionary hemorrhoid treatment) and Country Life (a multi-vitamin,mineral supplement).  You can see representative samples of the campaigns by logging on to: theideafactory.biz.