Now it should be said right from the outset that I detest rubbish marketing.  Y'know the sort.  The sort that's mass mailed out there or aggresively pushed onto you.  Generally speaking we're good at detecting this and the only harm it does is to annoy the heck out of us.  Few are actually persuaded by this garbage into parting with any cash.  And that's a good thing, that's a really good thing.  Marketers like this shouldn't be rewarded.

So the following should be treated as much as a warning to customers as it is any kind of lesson in how rubbish marketers can circumvent our bullshit detectors.

For you see, researchers have discovered that if these crap attempts at marketing are funny then it lowers our defences.  The experiment exposed people to adverts for a peppermint brand with four different kinds of strapline:

• funny
• positive but not funny
• distracting and neutral
• non distracting and neutral

Now to make things interesting, half of the participants were primed to be annoyed and wary of the company before seeing the advert.  A few minutes after they saw the advert they had to complete a test to see what impact the ads had on them.  They were shown ads from a range of peppermint brands, including the original, and were asked if they'd seen them before or not and how they felt about the brand.

Suffice to say, those that were primed to be resistant weren't very keen on the brand, with the one caveat of those ads that had funny straplines.  The funny text appeared to interfere with the automatic processes that usually underlie our resistance to aggressive marketing.

To test whether this just applied in the lab or whether it had real world implications the researchers tried again, this time with energy drinks.  The experiment was identical but when asked their feelings about the brand at the end, they also had to say how many discount vouchers they wanted for that brand.

Regardless of whether they were primed to be resistant, participants generally preferred brands that had been accompanied by positive images (funny or not). For students primed to be resistant, it was specifically brands accompanied by funny and neutral-distracting images that were more popular. The more resistance the students said they felt, the more they tended to show a favourable bias towards the brands accompanied by a humorous picture.

So why was this?  The researchers suggest that the humour had a double impact.  Firstly it distracted the customer from the crap advert they'd been exposed to, so people literally found it hard to be angry when laughter was on their mind.  Secondly, the act of laughing in itself helped to encourage people to think well of the brand that had made them laugh.

That's not to say it's all a bed of roses for marketers though.  You see whilst a funny strapline stopped negative feelings towards a brand, it didn't help to make them any more memorable.

Taken altogether, the results paint a nuanced picture. "The main contribution of this research is not the overall conclusion that humour in ads 'works'," the researchers said, "but that it sheds light into when and why humour should be preferred over non humorous positive emotions and neutral distractions." For brands that expect to meet resistance in their target audience, humour can help prevent the formation of negative associations. But distraction should be used in moderation – too much and the brand won't be remembered. From the consumers' perspective, beware advertisers bearing jokes – they could be using them to lower your guard.