Cartoon Humorous Illustration
There’s a fine line when it comes to using humorous copy and images in marketing. Sometimes a funny promotion can work wonders and other times, what you and your colleagues thought was hilarious will fall flat on its face with your general audience.
If you’ve come up with a humorous promotion idea, check out these Dos and Don’ts to determine whether your joke will sell or sink:
Dos
Do enlist a third party: If you can, obtain rights to a third-party image, such as a New Yorker cartoon, or engage an outside artist or photographer to design an image for use in your promotion. Include the source or artists’ name, and customers will recognize the cartoon or image as separate from your brand and business. It will still be funny, but there’s less of a risk that you could harm your company’s image in any way.
Do incorporate animals: Sometimes it’s easier to laugh at a joke when a dog, duck or horse is involved, and not a human. Most people sympathize with animals and using a domestic animal in a funny illustration or cartoon with a caption and headline is a great way to appeal to a wide range of customers. Keep it safe by considering humane and animal rights issues and you should have a promotion that lots of people can laugh at.
Do keep the joke relevant: If it doesn’t relate back to your product, service or brand then even the funniest idea imaginable can flop in a marketing promotion. Random humor may be more of a distraction from your business than a promotion. Keep the humor topical and relative to your business for the best results.
Don’ts
Don’t force a joke: Unless you are a comedian, the funny-factor of your business promotion shouldn’t be a high priority. Avoid sitting down to come up with a funny postcard, business card or flyer. If you are brainstorming and happen to discover a pun, idea, photograph or cartoon that you can use, then go for it. The best comedy is unrehearsed and happens when you least expect it.
Don’t joke about controversial topics: While political cartoons can be laugh out loud funny, they’re not appropriate marketing vehicles. If the joke is not something you’d talk about at work or with children, then don’t go there. Politics, religion and any other heated topics are no-nos for marketers. Humor that crosses the line can anger or isolate certain customers. If your not sure about an idea, then don’t use it. It’s best to play it safe.
A couple of weeks ago I showed you a series of covers from 1950's issues of Boys' Life by Lowell Hess. I talked a little about how Lowell, as a boy growing up in Oklahoma, had always wanted to work for Collier's magazine, and how he eventually did 3 covers and many interior illustrations for that magazine. Lowell had a great relationship with Collier's AD, Bill Chessman, who called Lowell his "Number One Fireman" because he always seemed to come up with an interesting and entertaining illustration idea for those stories Chessman was struggling with.Lowell's work for Chessman lead to an opportunity to do additional spots for Collier's Cartoon Editor, Gurney Williams. Collier's ran a regular humorous column called "48 States of Mind" which required several postage stamp-sized cartoons each week. Around 1950 or '51, Williams offered Lowell the chance to do a few of these spots.
Unfortunately, because of their small size, they are the sort of thing one might pay very little attention to when reading the column or flipping through the magazine. You get the sense that the AD's intention was not much more than to break up a large field of dull grey type with a little bit of decorative colour.
But look closer...
There are wonderful details,
amusing concepts,
and great character design...
... invested In real estate not much larger than your thumbnail.
Gurney Williams obviously thought so too.
In his scrap books of old printed samples, Lowell had carefully clipped and saved many of those tiny spots. Among them he enclosed a post-it note about the assignment for Williams, indicating that he had produced a year's worth of them for Collier's.
Here, for your amusement - and inspiration - are a few more (blown up big enough to properly appreciate).
* My Lowell Hess Flickr set.
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