Why aren’t ads featuring women funny? How to be funny ha ha, avoid offence and triple engagement from women seeking an ‘antidote to perfection’

Kellogg’s Australian Marketing Director Lucie Wolstenholme has never written humour into an agency brief but says it can do wonders for audience engagement – think Yellow Pages’ ‘Not Happy, Jan’ and BigPond’s ‘Too many rabbits in China’. “It’s a fine art to use humour without falling offensive or flat,” she says. Only a fifth of ads featuring women use humour, compared to more than half of ads featuring men, according to research from Are Media. ABC Radio host and comedian Wendy Harmer reckons 25 to 35-year-old men can’t be expected to write humour well for women. “You need that lived experience and relatability,” she says. Are Media’s Jane Waterhouse says humour delivers in spades: “We found that humour was three times more engaging than standard communication.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.