The Effective Sense in Nonsense
The Effective Sense in Nonsense
Although humour is more effective when it requires participation and a shared experience, when we frame it in the illogical and unexpected we see an even higher x2.7 memorability multiplier effect.
Humour x Illogical = x2.7 Multiplier Effect for Memorability
+% Likelihood to be a Top Third Performer on Memory Encoding
Source: n=15,000 Ipsos Creative|Spark video ad evaluations. Video ads were processed through Generative AI models to classify if creative tactics were present Yes/No. Video ads were grouped by themes of tactics they most represented. Individual tactics are represented with their proportional % variance explained in driving the effects metric.
This multiplier is impressive, yet why might illogical and unexpected events increase humour effects? Specific tactics like twist endings, illogical moments, and misdirection give a powerful contribution to these effects because they don't just talk at a passive audience, they draw people in as active players. They invite people to figure things out, making them active participants in the story. It’s simple. Break their expectations and you can increase your chance to be encoded in their memories.
Humour x Illogical = x2.7 Multiplier Effect for Memorability
Source: n=15,000 video ads evaluated in Creative|Spark. Each ad was classified by a Generative AI model for having the intent of using creative tactics laddering into the « Illogical » group. Ads in this group were compared to the total database in terms of their likelihood to be Top Third performers. Relative contribution to increased Memorability was based on gap analysis of ads that perform high vs low on memorability. Differences across tactics are re-percentaged to 100% to represent the extent to which each tactic differentiates between good and poor ads
When confronted with this evidence, some ads we’ve experienced and laughed with that didn’t make sense at the time now start to make sense in terms of their effectiveness. Iconic campaigns like Flat Eric for Levi’s Sta-Prest that debuted in 1999 remain iconic and part of the fabric of culture to this day in large part because they simply don’t make sense. Seeing a yellow puppet in a car bopping his head to a beat, then being pulled over by a cop is funny. Because it’s unexpected. In fact, it’s downright ridiculous. But it’s effective, as according to Levi’s, it sold a lot of Sta-Prest, contributing to a volume sales increase of 21 times in the UK over a four-month period.5
Source: Levi "Sta-Prest"
This use of the illogical and the subversion of expectations is not reserved for a bygone age of advertising. To this day, we see effective uses of humour to get encoded in peoples’ minds, with situations that verge on the bizarre, requiring the audience to reconcile what they are seeing and participate in the experience.
Source: Little Caesars "Crazy Puffs"
MEMORY ENCODING INDEX
As recently as the 2025 Super Bowl, we saw a serendipitous use of flying facial hair to represent the experience or expectation of a food product. Little Caeser’s ‘Whoa!’ shows actor Eugene Levy enjoying a box of Crazy Puffs, leading to his famed eyebrows flying off into the distance. And Pringle’s ‘Call of the Moustaches’ sees a group of moustaches fly through the air when called by blowing into a can.
Source: Pringles "Call of the Moustaches"
MEMORY ENCODING INDEX
Twix ‘Bears’ provides an example of how a clash of craziness and familiar setting can deliver humour and effectiveness. In this ad, we see two people on a camping trip talking about how the left or right of the Twix are “chewy, crunchy and delicious”, alongside two bears in the bushes saying the same thing about the people. It’s silly. It doesn’t make sense. Yet it makes us laugh and it’s effective.
Source: Twix "Bears"
MEMORY ENCODING INDEX
Another example of this clash of craziness and the familiar using animals is IRN-BRU Xtra ‘Unicorn Tears’ flavour. The ad takes a familiar documentary film approach on a farm, yet this farm harvests a somewhat different crop, teasing out tears from unicorns for IRN BRU. It’s lead unicorn tear farmer, Kelly, berates and insults a poor unicorn to farm its tears, then shifts to compliments to extract its tears of joy. Here we see the clash of craziness and the familiar from another angle. A familiar setting and face to camera documentary style, yet an outright bonkers proposition of farming unicorn tears. From start to finish, nothing really makes sense, yet it’s funny and effective.
Source: IRN-BRU Xtra "Unicorn Tears"
MEMORY ENCODING AI PREDICTION
A further example of the effectiveness sense in nonsense is eos ‘Pubes for the Planet’. I, for one, cannot recall another time when I was educated by animated pubic hair as to its efficacy in reducing soil erosion to help the planet. Its call to action in asking the audience to donate their pubic hair in a handy pack for the reward of a free tube of eos shave cream makes sense factually. The more people that donate, the more we can prevent soil erosion. Yet this information and the request is both playful and utterly unexpected. And like the other examples, it’s effective in its potential to increase sales and build brand equity, with an impressive Creative Effect Index and part of a campaign for eos that took home the Iridium Effie Award in 2024.
Source: eos "Pubes for the Planet"
CREATIVE EFFECT AI PREDICTION
eos was crowned the winner of the prestigious Iridium Award for the 2024 Global Best of the Best Effie Awards. Proof that it’s not only big brands who win Effie awards for marketing effectiveness, it’s the quality of the creative and understanding how to unlock the underlying insight. With their agency, Mischief, they did an exceptional job of really going out and tackling the market, from a different perspective. In a category long overdue for disruption, Mischief and eos set out to revolutionize the outdated and overly polite world of women’s shaving. The brand challenged norms by embracing an honest, raw, and refreshingly real approach to body hair, shifting the conversation to meet the needs and attitudes of a new generation. By anchoring itself in truth and tapping into underrepresented narratives, the campaign delivered relevance, resonance, and remarkable results.
Traci Alford, Effie Worldwide CEO
With these ads, we see effectiveness value when we embrace strangeness, oddity, near craziness, which in turn requires audience participation and contributes to above average Memory Encoding effects.
Yet it’s more than participation alone, as this injection of the illogical also creates escapism for the audience. As marketers and creatives focused on making ads, it’s easy to forget that when people get to experience them, they often don’t welcome them. When people stream video content or scroll social feeds, they are often there to escape their everyday lives, to be entertained, to pass the time
And in this clash of the illogical alongside the more familiar, of fantasy of flying moustaches and talking bears alongside the reality of a savoury or sweet snack, we see how the art of strangeness and oddity can provide a balance of getting the audience to participate in the fun, while also providing the escapism they crave when seeking out entertainment content.
Let’s explore this further. In our previous analysis, MISFITS, we uncovered how everyday people experience ads, and whether this leads to increased memorability, behaviour change, and ultimately sales. We discovered three types of MISFITS experiences, that when delivered together can boost sales by +20% vs. average performing ads.6
And when considering a unique, surprising and entertaining Creative Experience, we see in the use of humour and the illogical a way we can increase our chances to deliver this and increase memorability.
Creative Experiences
Does it have the potential to stand out and build memory structures?
Empathy & Fitting In
Does your creative address the audience context? Is your brand acting with empathy?
Creative Ideas
Does it have the power to shape peoples’ expectations?
As we reflect on these findings, we can see evidence of the value and missed opportunity of audience participation to memorability effects in advertising. Humour can be effective, but it needs to be more than cheap laughs and instead we need to trust our audience to participate as the humour unfolds. Yet we can amplify humour effects even further when we wrap it in events and situations that simply don’t make sense and, at times, juxtapose with the everyday and subvert their expectations.
But tactics that evoke participation and escapism only get us so far into understanding what contributes to effectiveness. Advertising needs to do more than be encoded in the mind. It needs to change hearts and minds. It needs to change behaviour to the benefit of the brand, by influencing the later moments of choice or consumption.
