Consumer Responses to Sexual Humor Advertisements

• Main Authors: Harrison, Rob, Blackford, Ben, Carlson, Leslie
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consumers; Humor; Sexual behavior
• ISSN: 0098-9258

In a Dannon Oikos television commercial, actor John Stamos and his girlfriend playfully feed each other yogurt. He smears yogurt on his lips and she kisses him clean. Stamos then spills yogurt on his lap. After she looks down to his lap and licks her lips, former sitcom co-stars Dave Coulier and Bob Saget interrupt the scene with playful banter in character from their television show, Full House. This advertisement first aired during the Super Bowl in 201_ and is among the most highly rated Super Bowl ads in recent years (Hortillosa 2013; Streib 2012). It represents an advertising strategy that combines sexual content with humorous content. While the utilization of sexual humor as an advertising strategy is common in practice, scant research on the topic exists in advertising literature despite the existence of various unanswered questions. For example, how are advertisers utilizing sexual humor in advertisements and how do consumers respond to sexual humor advertisements? In this study, we employed a sequential exploratory mixed-method research design (Creswell 2011) to understand patterns in the utilization of the sexual humor content in commercials and examine how consumers make sense of, and respond to, sexual humor advertising. To do this, we first identified advertisements that included both sexual and humorous content that aired during the Super Bowl between 2004 and 2014. We then conducted three focus groups with 5-7 undergraduate college students and had them respond to various commercials. We learned from the focus groups that there are nuances regarding the combination of sex and humor that influence how consumers react to such depictions. Specifically, we found indications that the order in which sex or humor occurs in a commercial, as well as the intensity of the sex and humor depictions, impact how consumers respond to the commercial itself and the product depicted in the commercial. First, our respondents recognized differences in advertising strategies that relate to how sexual humor is defined or the type of sexual humor employed. We labeled the strategies they described as (1) sex as humor and (2) sex and humor. The former represents a strategy wherein the sexual content is part of what make instances humorous; the latter represents a strategy wherein the sexual content is distinguishable from the humorous content. One participant's responses specifically highlight how they make sense of the distinction between sex as humor and sex and hu