Rolling in the Aisles

Marketing is a delicate balance of risk vs. reward and knowing when to exploit certain avenues. Humour is one such strategy that is regularly used to humanize a brand and open the consumer to considering a purchase. However, as humour is subjective, there is a risk that the audience may be offended and that single bad experience can ruin years of positive campaigning. This is lethal to a company's reputation and can take years to recover, if at all, like we have seen previously in the Mic Mac Mall case study. Certain brands can make use of humour more effectively but the target audience is the main consideration as to when it should be employed.
A company selling life insurance may consider a more tactful approach as their target audience is most likely forty and over, and the purchaser wants to feel that their affairs are tended under the responsible ministration of a reputable business. On the other hand, Burger King can get away with something like this and live to sell another Whopper which leads me to my next point about the stability of a company designating its ability to risk humourous advertising. A fast-food franchise or a clothing company has a lot of room for playful jest because at the end of the day people need their products. As products climb up the hierarchy of needs pyramid, the more precarious their position becomes and the more they risk an embargo if the ad goes south.
Video advertisements are more often received as moral offenders and here is an example of an ad that is detrimental to the company's worth as a viable product. If gifting flowers gives the impression that your significant other is an ugly hag, how is hand-delivering them going to change their sentimental value?
Racism is another realm of humour best left to Russell Peters and not in advertising. This advertisement not only uses Ashton Kutcher in the archaic 'brown-face' makeup from yore, but the message for the product, Popchips, is completely lost in its desperate effort to incite laughter.
Advertising also needs to consider whom they mock and how it may perceived as a stab rather than a light-hearted 'poke'. This campaign against smoking by the Lung Cancer Alliance was not contextualized enough to link the billboard to the message of anti-smoking and the demographics that were depicted took great offence to the declaration of apparent murderous intent.
In summation, humour is a legitimate form of marketing when used in context and can lead to a humanization of the brand, but as companies that sell self-actualizing qualities that are less imperative to human survival tempt fate with potentially damaging ads, they run the risk of crumbling the foundation they worked so hard to assemble. As time heals all wounds, so does bankruptcy cure bad jokes.