When Business Becomes Art: Humor in English and Italian Advertising

Subsequently, this study will present the state of advertising in 
England with a particular focus on how it is spread across different 
places like transports in London, the Underground, has become over 
the years more and more a place of strength and an important means 
of propagation for marketing strategies in England. This is possible 
because in the Underground there is a large percentage of advertising, 
and because there is a large influx of passengers that travel every day 
on this means of transport, so it is possible to reach a target of 
customers or potential customers numerically high and different. 
In the case of Italy, some cases in which the use of humor led to a 
subsequent action by the Advertising Self-Regulation System to 
amend or prevent the disclosure of certain spot will be discussed: you 
will notice that many censored spots have in common precisely the 
element of humor. An emblematic case is represented by Italian 
Oliviero Toscani, the famous photographer who has produced some of 
the most beautiful and significant advertising campaigns distinguish 
himself clearly in the standardized  and not very creative advertising 
Italian scene. Over and over again he was censored, and many times 
this has product an echo that made even more talk of his "scandals".  
Still on the way "alternative" to advertise, it will be explored the 
unique world of guerrilla marketing, an intelligent and low cost way to 
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do advertising, which affects the individual with the weapon of 
unexpected and overwhelming humor. Finally, will be considered two 
advertising campaigns that have proved very successful: advertising 
campaign of Absolut vodka and the Nike one, realized for the victory 
of Italy in football World Cup2006. 
To demonstrate how the humor can be effective in advertising, my 
consulting reference sources were books and essays in English and 
Italian about the humor in advertising, from different schools of 
thought, although there is not an extensive bibliography on this 
subject. Internet, however, has proved a mine of information and 
pictures about it. After an analysis of documents, it was done a 
reworking and a comparison between the two realities taken into 
consideration, the Italian one and the British one. The English prefer 
irony and humor, all of which constitutes an own style that 
distinguishes it from others. These features unfortunately are not yet 
present in Italy.  
The choice of completing the thesis in English is simply dictated by a 
desire to challenge myself, and I must thank my  supervisor for the 
trust placed in me. 
 
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1.1 The art of creating advertising
 
 
The power of modern advertising 
 is within this growing “ubiquity” or  
“everywhereness” of advertising (Fraim 2000) 
In contemporary society, advertising is everywhere. We cannot walk 
down the street, shop, watch television, go through our mail, log on to 
the Internet, read a newspaper or take a train without encountering it. 
Whether we are alone, with our friends or family, or in a crowd, 
advertising is always with us, if only on the label of something we are 
using. Given this ubiquity, it is strange that many people are reluctant 
to pay attention to ads. An ad is never the programme they are 
watching, never the letter they are waiting for, never the website they 
are seeking, nor the part of the newspaper they are reading. 
1
Advertising has a great influence on our lives. Today’s advertisements 
also inform and guide many of the important decisions we make.  
The way in which advertisements are affecting and shaping our 
attitudes, lifestyles and culture are too many to tally.  
 
 
1. Guy Cook, “The discourse of advertising”, Routledge, 1992, pag.1 
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Traditional definitions of advertising include a series of elements that 
distinguish the field from others. Each innovation in communication 
has been used for advertising and, in some way, each has changed 
advertising, which in turn has changed the set of elements used in its 
definition. Over the years, advertising has been defined in many ways. 
Defined very generally, advertising is the “promotion of goods or 
services for sale through impersonal media”
2
. Industry icon Leo 
Burnett defined it as “selling corn flakes to people who are eating 
Cheerios”, and U.S. President Calvin Coolidge called it “the life of 
trade”. Textbooks give a stricter definition of advertising, such as in 
Jobber
3
, where he defines advertising as “any paid form of 
nonpersonal communication of ideas or products in the prime media, 
i.e. television, the press, posters, cinema and radio”.Research in 
marketing and reception theories should be able to suggest how best to 
develop and target appeal, which may be created in many ways, with 
emotive connotations and lifestyle associations, or through factual 
information, depending in part on culture-specific values, in part on 
product type.
4 
 
2. From the “Collins Concise Dictionary”. 
3. David Jobber, “Principles and Practice of Marketing”, McGraw-Hill, 2001 
4. Beverly Adab & Cristina Valdès, 2004, Introduction from “The Translator”, pag.161 
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Advertising could be used to make the target audience aware of the 
existence of a product or service, and the benefits it confers to 
customers. Advertising influences consumers partly by giving 
information but mostly by appealing to needs, motives and emotions. 
Consumption can be driven by functional or social needs. Clothes 
satisfy a functional need; fashion satisfies a social need. A house 
serves a functional need; a home serves a social need. A car may 
satisfy a functional need but the type of car one chooses can satisfy a 
social need. Understanding variations in people’s needs and motives is 
important for developing effective advertising. People’s behaviour is 
not determined only by their needs and motivations, but also by their 
surroundings, and the context in which they make decisions. 
Advertising has a great influence on our lives because it also informs 
and guides many of the important decisions we make. Advertising 
could be used to make the target audience aware of the existence of a 
product or service, and the benefits it confers to customers.
5 
As Carmen Millàn Varela
6
 says, advertising “sells” but it also does 
much more than that: it creates identities for products, companies, and 
also for audiences. 
 
5.  Marieke De Mooij, 2004, “Translating Advertising: Painting the tip of an iceberg”. From 
“The Translator”, pag.179 
6. Carmen Millàn-Varela, “Exploring Advertising in a Global Conyext: Food for Thought, 
2004, From”The Translator, pag.245 
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As Williamson points out, “advertisements’ role  is to attach meanings 
to products, to create identities for the goods (and service providers) 
they promote: a process today described as “branding”.  
“Branding” is a crucial element of successful advertising that 
involves, or should involve, careful cross-linguistic and cross-cultural 
research. While the goal of brand names, and logos, is to facilitate 
recognition of a company and its products in any location and 
context
7
.  
Posters, book jackets, political advertising, food and clothing labels, 
information leaflets, product recall notices, home-made printed or 
hand-written pages stuck on lampposts, shop and street signs all 
advertise either a product, a service or some kind of information. They 
may not always be directly selling a product, but they are reinforcing 
or constructing an image, seeking to affect people’s behaviour in some 
way, or at least to make them stop and think
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. To gain and maintain 
attention, the advertisements should be planned with greater care and 
must be more creative, pleasing and rewarding for consumers. Many 
advertisers now believe that the role of advertising is not only 
persuasive but also entertainment. 
 
7. Jeremy Munday, 2004, “Advertising: some challenges to translation theory”, from“The 
Translator”pag.199 
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The first step in the creation of advertising creative and effective is the 
planning of a strategy of the message, namely the definition of the 
overall message to communicate to the public. The development of an 
effective strategy of the message begins with the identification of 
benefits for the customer that can be used as decoy advertising. At this 
point we need to develop a creative concept (a "great idea") to 
implement the strategy so distinctive and memorable. Sometimes, 
simple ideas can become exceptional advertising campaigns. The next 
step in planning advertising is to transform the idea into an effective 
advertising that can arouse the attention and interest of the target 
market. Subsequently, the company must choose the tone of 
advertising. Some companies adopt a positive tone, highlighting the 
benefits of their products and generally avoid a humour that can 
distract consumers from the message. Many other companies take a 
rather sharp humour to distinguish themselves from the mass of 
competitors.
8 
 
 
 
8.  P. Kotler – G. Armstrong, 2006, “Principi di marketing”, Pearson Ed. Italia. 
 
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1.2 The language of advertising
 
Advertising is one of the most controversial of all contemporary 
genres: it is considered annoying, intrusive, shallow, predictable, even 
dangerous and manipulative, but also creative, artistic, ingenious, 
entertaining and uplifting. Advertisers continue to use deceptive 
strategies for disguising or avoiding mentioning unattractive facts or 
for describing a product or service in such a way that the inattentive 
reader may see it only in a positive light. As Cook
1 
suggests, the major 
function of advertising is conative as it aims to persuade people to do 
something, yet its use of language and other modes is often closer to 
poetic function. 
According to Wilmshurst and MacKay, advertising uses 
“manipulative, distortive and loaded language” to “catch our 
imagination and predispose us to the product or service on offer”. 
Indeed, we may say that rules are intentionally and systematically 
broken and language is used in a clever, tight, stylized and persuasive 
way presumably to achieve an even greater, more salient, more 
pervasive, more penetrating, and ultimately more persuasive effect on 
the reader. Advertising language displays creative writing features 
both at the lexical and the morpho-syntactic level.  
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Colloquial vocabulary recurs, technical terms are also used to describe 
the specific qualities of a product. Moreover, loan words and 
neologism are frequently used and play a fundamental role in 
advertising. Indeed, superlative and evaluative adjectives with clear 
positive connotations are also frequently used in ads.
9 
Advertisers have a predilection for strategies which distract from or 
add to the literal meaning of language. This may be effected at the 
graphic level through deviant spellings or by fusing two words. A 
popular use of both of these techniques is found in ads referring 
obliquely to the World Wide Web. At word level, literal meaning can 
be undermined in many ways, most obviously by puns: the effect is to 
catch the reader’s attention and to amuse, which presumably smoothes 
the way for the more serious function of selling, improving brand 
awareness and so on.
10
 Apart from cultural values and life style, there 
is also the question of writing styles and rhetorical effect. 
Advertisements are also viewed as persuasive communication, of 
which rhetoric is an integral part. The persuasive communication 
function of advertising is biased toward rational claims and a direct 
address of the public. 
9. Annarita Taronna, “Interrogating the language of advertising. Dis/similarities between 
English and Italian Ads”, Papageno Ed., 2006, pag. 21,23. 
10. Guy Cook, “The discourse of advertising”, Routledge, 1992, pag. 9-10 
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