Comedy in Advertising: What Actually Works

The funniest ads aren't competing with other ads anymore. They're competing with TikTok creators who don't need approval.

The Game Changed

Here's what no one in advertising wants to admit: we're losing the comedy war to people who've never sat through a tissue session.

A 23-year-old creator shoots something on their phone at 2pm. By 4pm it has 3 million views. No brief. No strategy deck. No legal review. No client call where someone asks if we can "try a version where the joke is more obvious." No six weeks in edit. No testing.

Just: idea, execution, publish, resonance.

Meanwhile, your "funny" Super Bowl spot took nine months, forty people, and $8 million. It tested well. It hit all the brand markers. It was approved by everyone who needed to approve it.

And it's competing for the same laugh—from the same audience—as that kid with a ring light.

This isn't a complaint about kids these days. It's a structural observation: the approval process that protects brands from risk is now the primary thing preventing them from being funny.

The Approval Trap

Every layer of approval optimizes for safety. That's the job. Legal is supposed to reduce liability. The CMO is supposed to protect the brand. Research is supposed to validate that this will work.

But comedy doesn't survive optimization. It gets sanded.

What happens in each round:

• Round 1: "Love it. Can we just soften the opening so it doesn't feel too aggressive?"

• Round 2: "Legal flagged the competitor mention. Can we make it more general?"

• Round 3: "Research said some people didn't get the joke. Can we add a line that explains it?"

• Round 4: "The CEO saw it. He thinks we should add a product shot earlier."

• Round 5: "Everyone's aligned. But can we do one pass to tighten the humor?"

Each note is reasonable in isolation. None of them are wrong. But in aggregate, they're a death sentence.

By the time your ad ships, it's not funny anymore. It's pleasant. It's brand-safe. It's watchable. But the thing that made the room laugh in the first presentation—the surprise, the edge, the timing—has been optimized out.

The creators you're competing against? They don't have rounds. They have post.

The Authenticity Gap

Audiences can smell process. They know when something was made by a committee. There's a tell—a kind of smoothness that reads as corporate, even when the content is technically "edgy."

The comedy that wins now feels like it came from a person, not a brand. It has fingerprints. Rough edges. A point of view that feels singular rather than consensus-driven.

This is almost impossible to manufacture through traditional pipelines. The pipeline exists to remove fingerprints. That's what approval is: systematically sanding away anything that could be attributed to an individual perspective, until what remains is safe, defensible, and utterly unmemorable.

The paradox: Brands want the authenticity of creator content. But authenticity is precisely what the approval process destroys.

You can't get to "feels like a person made this" through a system designed to ensure no single person is accountable.

What We're Actually Competing Against

Let's be specific about the competition.

Speed. A creator can respond to a cultural moment in hours. A brand takes weeks—if it responds at all. By the time your "relevant" spot is approved, the moment is dead.

Volume. Creators post constantly. They learn in public. They iterate in real-time. Brands make 2-3 pieces of comedy content a year and need each one to be a home run. That's not how comedy works. Comedy is a numbers game. You need a lot of swings to find what lands.

Risk tolerance. A creator who flops loses nothing but a day. A brand that flops becomes a case study in what not to do. This asymmetry makes brands conservative by necessity—and conservative comedy is an oxymoron.

Lack of baggage. Creators don't carry brand guidelines, legal mandates, or CMO preferences. They just have taste and an audience. That's the whole stack.

This isn't a fair fight. And pretending it is—by doing the same process but "funnier"—is a losing strategy.

Why Most Brand Comedy Fails

It's not because the creatives aren't talented. It's not because the briefs are bad. It's because the system is structurally incapable of producing what it's asking for.

The ask: Be funny, surprising, edgy, memorable, and authentic.

The process: Involves 40 people, 6 months, and a dozen approval gates designed to minimize surprise and risk.

These are incompatible. The system produces what the system is designed to produce: safe, defensible, forgettable work that technically qualifies as "comedy" because someone in the room smiled.

The great brand comedy that does exist—the Old Spices, the Apples, the rare Super Bowl spots that actually land—isn't great because of the process. It's great despite the process. It survives because someone with authority protected it. Because a client was brave enough to say "don't change it." Because the stars aligned.

That's not a system. That's luck.

The Old Spice Lesson Everyone Misses

When people study "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like," they focus on the creative: the one-takes, the absurdist escalation, Isaiah Mustafa's delivery.

What they miss is the approval structure.

That campaign was created by Wieden+Kennedy, a shop with decades of credibility and a client relationship built on trust. The client, Procter & Gamble, had a brand team willing to take a real swing. The campaign was protected from the typical death-by-committee because the people in the room had the authority and conviction to say no to the safe path.

The creative was great. But the creative only existed because the system allowed it to exist.

Most brands don't have that structure. They have the opposite: layers of approval designed to ensure that nothing surprising ever reaches the public.

If you want to make comedy that competes, you don't just need better creatives. You need a different system.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what I think world-class CDs already know but rarely say out loud:

The best comedy writers don't want to work in advertising. They can make more money, with more creative freedom, doing literally anything else. The ones who do work in advertising are fighting a system that actively resists what they do best.

"Testing well" and "being funny" are almost mutually exclusive. Comedy tests poorly because comedy requires surprise, and research requires repetition. The ads that test best are the ones that are most predictable—which is the opposite of funny.

Awards shows reward different work than the market does. The Cannes Lions reel is full of comedy that "worked" in a very specific sense: it impressed other ad people. Whether it moved product, built brand affinity, or competed with creator content is a different question—and often the answer is no.

Clients aren't the enemy. The bravest creative work often comes from brave clients. The problem is structural: most client organizations aren't set up to empower brave decisions. The CMO who approves something risky and it flops? They're gone. The CMO who approves something safe and it underperforms? That's just how advertising works. The incentives point toward safety.

The best brand comedy now often doesn't look like "advertising." It looks like content. It lives on social. It's made fast, distributed natively, and doesn't try to out-produce the competition. It tries to out-think them.

What Still Works

I'm not arguing that brand comedy is dead. I'm arguing that brand comedy created through traditional processes is increasingly uncompetitive. The stuff that still works tends to share a few traits:

1. Structural Premises Over One-Off Jokes

The best brand comedy isn't a single funny ad—it's a premise that generates infinite content.

• Progressive's "Dr. Rick" isn't about any individual spot. It's about a comedic engine: a life coach who helps people avoid becoming their parents. That engine can run forever.

• Geico's "15 minutes" gave them permission to do literally any comedic format because the premise is just "we'll do anything to remind you we exist."

Structural premises are defensible because they're strategic. You're not selling a joke—you're selling a platform. That's easier to protect through approvals.

2. Speed Over Polish

Some brands have figured out that speed is more important than production value. Fast-follow content that responds to culture in days, not months. Lower-fi executions that feel native to social feeds rather than broadcast.

This requires a different approval structure: smaller teams, pre-approved creative territories, trust in the people making the work.

3. Restraint Over Effort

Sometimes the funniest move is not trying hard. Deadpan delivery. Unexpected brevity. Confidence in the audience to get it without explanation.

Restraint is hard to approve because it looks like "not enough." But it often lands harder than overproduced comedy because it feels like confidence rather than desperation.

4. Creator Partnerships Done Right

The smartest brands aren't trying to out-create creators. They're partnering with them—and actually letting them create.

Not "here's a script, say these words." But "here's the product, here's the vibe, make something you'd actually post."

This requires giving up control. Which, again, most brand approval structures are designed to prevent.

The Real Ask

If you're a CD who's frustrated that your best comedy keeps dying in approvals, the problem isn't your work. The problem is the system you're working within.

The solution isn't "get better at selling ideas"—although that helps. The solution is structural:

Shorter approval chains. Every person who has to say yes is a chance for the idea to die. Reduce the chain.

Pre-approved creative territories. Define the sandbox in advance. What topics are in-bounds? What tone is acceptable? Get alignment on the territory, then trust the team to execute within it.

Speed as a value. Build processes that can respond in days, not months. Accept that some things will be imperfect. Imperfect and timely beats polished and irrelevant.

Protect the protectors. The clients and creative leaders who take risks need air cover. If every failed swing ends a career, no one will swing.

Accept the asymmetry. You will never be as fast, as prolific, or as risk-tolerant as individual creators. Stop trying to beat them at their game. Find a different game—one where brand resources, production capabilities, and cultural reach are advantages rather than liabilities.

The Point

The funniest ads aren't competing with other ads anymore.

They're competing with creators who have no approval process, no brand guidelines, no legal review, and no fear of getting fired.

That's the landscape. Pretending otherwise—optimizing within the old system, hoping the next campaign will somehow break through despite the same structural constraints—is a slow way to become irrelevant.

The brands that will win at comedy in the next decade are the ones willing to rethink how comedy gets made. Not just the creative. The system.

And the CDs who will thrive are the ones who stop fighting the approval process and start rebuilding it.

That's the job now.