Christina Moore (00:00)
Marketing has become measurable, but not memorable. Let me paint the scene. You’re sitting in the boardroom reviewing campaign performance. Cost per click is down, conversion is steady, but no one’s really talking about your brand online. Does that sound familiar? The brands that win aren’t the most optimised, they’re the most human. And humour is one of the fastest ways to get there. Because if people don’t feel anything, they don’t remember you. And if they don’t remember you,

They don’t choose you. So today I’m speaking with Paddy Gilmore. He’s built a framework for using humour as a business tool.

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (01:21)
my name is Paddy Gilmore. I run a consultancy called Humascope, and I help brands to understand, explore, and use humour as a key business tool. I do this because humour has been shown to make people more likely to buy. So in effect, what I’m doing is educating brands and businesses on how to get more customers. So that’s what I do.

Christina Moore (01:47)
I’ve done a little bit of research and you kind of argue that humour isn’t just about entertainment and that it’s a ⁓ commercial tool, a device that brands can use. What do you think that most marketers misunderstand about humour?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (02:03)
I think.

There’s several different things. think one of the things that marketers sometimes think is that it’s basically just about jokes. And because it’s about jokes, it’s a bit frivolous. So it’s not really that, you know, it’s not really worth considering. That’s the first thing. I think secondly, they think it’s more like it’s like an intuitive thing. So it be someone in their office who’s really, really funny, know, Jim’s really funny. He’s great at crafting really funny, you know, funny ads, content. Let’s just leave it to him, that kind of thing.

What I do is I look at humour in a quite methodical view, know, I think quite a methodical approach to it.

looking at the way it works in the brain, the way it works with emotions, the way it works socially, and looking at how brands successfully use it. And then when I’m speaking to brands, I can then say, okay, this is how say Volkswagen have used it, this is how McDonald’s have used it, this is how IKEA use it. So let’s see how you can use it.

Christina Moore (03:01)
And do you think that differs depending on the industry? there kind of like different types of humour that work better in other, ⁓ let’s say for instance, one that retail would use ⁓ and then another that B2B would use?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (03:17)
It all depends on me. I wouldn’t say it’s category specific. I’d say a lot to do with the brand and the audience. That matters hugely. Some brands have a heritage of using humour, such as Ryanair. Some brands simply don’t, like Tiffany. So there are big questions to be asked about not only the type of humour, but also the brand’s heritage and how it’s perceived in people’s minds.

Christina Moore (03:41)
So you would definitely, you would say that if for instance, brand like Tiffany De Beers, they approached you, you would, and would you advise them not to use humour or would you then say there’s a certain type of humour that you would?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (03:57)
I know I basically say well the first thing I’d have to do is look at you know your history of marketing look at the kind of marketing you’ve been doing if you you know I mean I would imagine I can’t think of Tiffany using humour I think they have done but you know they might say look we want to explore it and I’ll say okay let’s explore you know let’s if it works with you

Christina Moore (04:19)
You said that you kind of, have a method. Is this a method that you fit together like a jigsaw puzzle or is it like a step-by-step framework that you have?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (04:29)
It’s like a step-by-step framework. It’s a way of looking at humour with a slightly detached view. One of the difficulties when we talk about humour is what kind of terms do we use? How do we talk about it? Some people might say, well, we don’t like humour, but we do like wit. That kind of thing.

And so one of the first things I do in any workshop, in any training session, is say, OK, let’s get our terms right. Let’s find out what it is we’re talking about. And then let’s kind of create the building blocks and find the right structure for your brand and for your product.

what I do is I show the whole range of humorous marketing. I go, you know, it’s basically a like a sweet shop and say, hey, you are, these are all the different types of humour that we know of and that we can see. And these are the brands that use them. And there’s always a point where the brand will say, OK, that I think is us.

That’s where we sit.

Christina Moore (05:30)
You mentioned that you have like a, guess, a repertoire of different types of humour Without giving too much away, obviously, would you be able to go through some of those with us?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (05:41)
Sure, I mean if you take a famous advertising campaign, so The Economist did a great campaign, which started in 1990s, or 1980s actually, and it’s gone on for like 20 years. It’s called White Out of Red, and The Economist ads are seen as being some of the wittiest, funniest ads, you know, in Britain at least, over the past 30 years. They use satire in their advertising, which means there’s a butt of the joke.

However, there’s also that but the joke is not defined, which means it doesn’t feel like they’re picking on someone.

They are, there is a victim, but it’s in a way like a nameless victim. So this means it’s satire, but it’s not harsh, you know, that kind of thing. That’s just one type. I mean, there’s lots and lots of different types. So what I do is I go through and I show lots and lots of examples. So marketers can think, okay, yeah, we can see where we sit.

Christina Moore (06:40)
Yeah, in marketing, we talk a lot about, you know, making an emotional connection. And that’s kind of like right up there with, you know, like storytelling and narrative arc. But would you say that humour is a fast track to getting that human connection that everyone’s looking for?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (07:00)
Big

time, big time. No, it’s huge and huge important. It’s basically, so within our brains, there are three things that, know, in terms of evolution, three things that trigger pleasure, which are food, sex, and humour. And so this is why it is so important.

I don’t advise clients about food or sex, but I kind of do advise clients about humour. It is a key, key human trait. It’s been going on for centuries, millennia. It’s also innate. When children are born without being able to see or hear, they still have the ability to laugh. So there is something key about us as a species, which means we have this trait.

and ⁓ I think it’s only wise for brands to explore it.

Christina Moore (07:57)
Given that it’s such a core trait of our humanness and perhaps in the future be very, important in an AI world, why do you think brands shy away from that? Why do think they kind of like, like, oop?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (08:05)
Mm-hmm.

I think there’s several reasons. think partly it’s about, know, is this scene being non-serious? We’re a serious brand and we have to be very serious. Partly that. There’s partly the view that humour is subjective. It’s just, you know, according to different people, something I might misunderstand. There’s also very strong view that humour doesn’t travel.

and so forth. there’s a lot of different objections, but what I do is I take them one by one and I firstly look at how valid they are, then I look at how they can be minimised, and then I look at how they can be eradicated. If a certain type of humour is perceived as being too risky, okay, we can try another type. And because the commercial benefits are there, it makes sense to take the wisest path, really.

Christina Moore (09:01)
You mentioned humour being able to travel we know that different communities and even different cultures, and I mean from one culture, British versus French, they have a different type of humour or predominantly a different type of humour. Is that something that you pick up on when you’re doing your consulting?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (09:20)
is something which is often brought up in conversation. Generally, way that I approach it is, let’s suppose we’re at an audience. We’ll say audiences in three separate countries, say Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. And we’re selling, say, deodorants. Typically, their needs for a deodorant will be stronger than any differences in terms of human usage, which for a brand,

is actually really good news because it means that rather than you having to create three different advertising campaigns, you can just create the one campaign. And what’s more is, you know, if you take countries further afield,

say Turkey or South Africa or Australia, then the needs of the audience in terms of what are they looking for in a deodrant would be extremely similar. So I think it’s very much one of those things that similarities are often more important than the differences. There are differences in terms of geography and nations, definitely, but they’re often not as accentuated as people often think.

Christina Moore (10:28)
So if the goal is to be more human, what stops brands from doing it? Usually it comes down to risk, but not in the way most teams think about it. There are two risks here. The risk of using humour badly and the risk of not using it at all. If you choose humour, the question becomes, what safeguards do you put in place? And if you don’t, the question is, what happens to a brand no one cares about? I think we know the answer to that one.

Because if my thesis is right, then playing it safe isn’t neutral, it’s actively making you easier to ignore. And as Paddy points out, the bigger risk might actually be irrelevance.

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (11:10)
Well, it’s a two-part question. In terms of what safeguards you have in place, a lot depends on the type of humour being used. The analogy I always use is, let’s suppose you’re going skiing, you’re not going to wear a cycle helmet, because even though it might protect your hair when you’re cycling, it’s not right for skiing.

These are potential risks about using that type of humour. This is how we can prevent those risks happening. And then go ahead and either brief your creative team or brief your agency or your agencies and then take it from there.

Christina Moore (11:41)
If you’re listening to this and wondering where you sit, this is exactly what I assess with the content power score. It looks at how memorable, relevant and discoverable your content actually is. Because reach without recall is a weak position. You’ll see what’s working, what isn’t and what to fix first. The link is in the description.

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (12:02)
In terms of risk of not using humour, I would perceive it as being quite great, being very, very big. So many people today don’t really care about brands. I saw a statistic late last year

which said that people wouldn’t care if three quarters of all brands were to disappear. So that therefore means that for brands to engage people, they have to really entertain a bit more. It be a bit more down to earth, a bit less serious, and a bit more human.

you want to relate to people, you want to engage with people, you know, speak to them on their own terms.

Christina Moore (12:43)
You might remember we touched on this in my interview with Patrick Callister. The research they’re both referring to is by Havas Group. They found that roughly 75 % of brands could simply disappear. And looking specifically at the UK, while 90 % of the British population expect brands to provide content, 63 % believe the content being created by brands in Britain is poor, irrelevant, and fails to deliver. I hope you’re paying attention.

So marketing teams are pouring effort into channels only to create work that people instantly forget, which couldn’t be worse for brands. I’d rather they hated the content because at least it would have activated an emotional response. This situation creates a very practical question. What actually delivers growth? Not in theory, real results. Because if humour really is a commercial lever, you should be able to see it show up.

in performance.

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (13:44)
You can look at Schumer’s campaigns and the measurements that have been done on them, and you can see they’ve been successful. A great example of this is Snickers. When You’re Not You When You’re Hungry, when that came out in 2010, sales of Snickers went up 15.9 % in the first year alone. They increased market share in 56 out of their 58 territories.

So that’s a really, really strong case for using humour. And there have been many examples of human beings also being used in B2B. Volvo trucks have used it extremely effectively. One of their trucks, they sold what they were predicted to sell in one year, they sold in six months on the back of a humorous ad campaign. So my advice is always, okay, look at other…

know, businesses, ideally businesses within your category. Look at what they’ve done. Obviously don’t copy them, but learn from the people who have succeeded, you know, because obviously from people who have succeeded, we can learn our best lessons.

Christina Moore (14:49)
The instinct for most brands, especially in finance, B2B, or anything of that nature, is to become more serious, more controlled, more professional. But that creates distance. And if your product already feels complex or intimidating, serious marketing just compounds the problem. So if being human is what makes you memorable, can serious brands afford not to use humour? And this is where the logic flips.

Humour isn’t a distraction from credibility. In many cases, it’s what makes credibility accessible.

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (15:26)
I think though a lot depends on basically how serious the product is. And often the more serious it is, the more humour is necessary to really get people interested. For me, the nightmare client would be a joke shop because it’s kind of funny already. But I’ve worked on things, working with HSBC, selling mortgages.

mortgages and investments and so forth and loans. You know it’s extremely serious thing for obvious reasons and that’s why humour is necessary because it just makes these things a bit more palatable. We think okay that can be for me or that can be for our business.

Christina Moore (16:14)
You know, I can see how that would work because I guess if you had a quote unquote boring industry or finance, in my view, you then wouldn’t want to compound that as a consumer, as a customer, as a potential customer. If I’m already hesitant to use your service because I think that it just feels like a chore, that’s probably the better way I should frame it.

It feels like a chore. And then you use very serious advertising or marketing. I just wouldn’t feel compelled

if CMOs listening wanted to introduce humour into their marketing, where should they start? Of course with you, but what would be like their next step?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (17:04)
The first

thing I would recommend, I always say this, is go onto YouTube and look at however many funny ads you want to watch. Look at funny ads. And just kind of get a sense of it, get a sense of the territory, you know. And just kind of, you have a feel of, you know, you know your product, you know your brand, you know your audience.

So just get us from there.

Christina Moore (17:32)
Up to this point, we’ve been testing the idea in theory, but theory only gets you so far. If this holds, you should be able to see it working in the real world, not just in principle, but in performance. So I asked Paddy about one of the first campaigns he worked on, because this is where the thesis either stands up or falls apart.

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (17:55)
the first big campaign I worked on was Sing It Kitty, which is a campaign for Three that came out in I think about 2014 and that featured a singing cat. It was hugely popular. 73 % of people who saw it said they liked the ad. It went out, it was huge on social. On day one, it was communicated to I think about almost 22 million people.

of whom I think up to a million people engaged with it. So that was a really good response on the back of it. And what I did is I helped, you know, kind of writing the ad, coming up with ideas behind it, seeing how it then work on social across different platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and so forth. And yeah, that was a wonderful, wonderful thing to work on.

Christina Moore (18:47)
what brands do you think are using humour very well today?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (18:51)
Ryanair do it extremely well. They know what they’re doing. They are extremely good on social. And they’re extremely good not just at creating content that does extremely well on social, but reacting to other content on social. Some brands are good at one but not the other. They have the gift of being very good at both. So they definitely stand out.

I think in terms of consistency, IKEA, they do really, really strong stuff. That’s part of the reason why they’re the world’s biggest furniture retailer.

Christina Moore (19:29)
So if you take a step back from everything we’ve covered, the pattern is fairly consistent. The content that succeeds connects with our core human traits. And humour, when it’s used deliberately, is one of the clearest ways to create that connection, which brings us back to the original idea. The brands that win aren’t the most optimised, they’re the most human. But that’s not just a strategy, it’s a mindset. So to close,

I asked Paddy a more personal question. After years of working with brands, what are the mindsets that have actually carried him through his career?

Paddy Gilmore / HumourScope® (20:07)
Oh wow. Curiosity. Persistence. Affability. Just getting on with people. Yeah. I think. I think most people would say that. Most people would say I’m a pretty decent guy. no.

Great stuff. Well, Christina, thank you.

Christina Moore (20:32)
Thank you, Fadi. Thanks for your time. I very much appreciate