In a past life I enjoyed performing at NYC area comedy clubs and doing my best to amuse highly successful drunk stooges with insane stories from my life. I got a lot of pleasure out of making people laugh at the random thoughts that bounce around my brain on a daily basis.
Back then, I had a rather cynical view of humanity that those who saw my shows tended to sympathize with and enjoy. Since moving to Los Angeles and being forced to endure LA drivers my less than positive take on humanity has only deepened.
I believe my success on stage was in large part due to the crowd empathizing with my skits and buying in to my vision of humor. I personally believe that the more you trust people with the precise details of your life the more they will open up and trust you.
Just like me, my audience knew what it was like to be a fringe cool kid while growing up in the suburbs. Fringe cool kids were kids who weren’t quite cool enough to hang out with the real cool kids, but were too cool to hang out with the dorky kids. We were cool kids on the outside looking in.
They also knew what it was like to have an overbearing Jewish mother who would somehow magically show up at the climax moments of your childhood, like during your first kiss with the girl that you liked or the moment before you smoked your first cigarette.
She would usually show up without really understanding the social implications, including embarrassing you in front of all your friends and forcing you to abort the mission of the day.
If you are able to connect with your audience, you can even help them find the humor in stories they can’t 100% empathize with. For instance, my college experience working sales at Victoria’s Secret while being a guy. I believe that humor is often dependent on getting an audience to leave reality for just a moment and join you in your version of Candy Land.
What I learned from those days is that performing stand up comedy is just about identical to online marketing. You follow nearly the exact same social patterns to reach your desired outcome, and if you don’t follow those patterns you will put your audience to sleep.
I’ve found creating the following four elements critical to both stand up comedy and online advertising:
1. Empathy: Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. In online advertising, if you create a story that people can connect with you’ve already won.
An example of this is the Dollar Shave Club ads. Who doesn’t want great blades for a dollar? I can immediately connect myself to this cause.
Empathy creates interest in both online advertising and comedy. Many people empathized with my Jewish mother story, which caused them to remain focused and interested. Talking about a shared experience caused them to flash back to a moment in their child hood that was similar to my story. This escape from reality often culminated in a laugh. Referencing common experiences is a great way to gain a foothold in your audience’s consciousness when marketing online.
2. Speak to your audience: I made plenty of mistakes while performing stand-up when I was younger, like the time I went on stage in front of a group of super-ultra-religious right-wing Christian women in their 60′s who just walked off a plane from Hattiesburg Mississippi.
Unsurprisingly, they didn’t get this message because they couldn’t empathize with this sort of humor. Just like in comedy, if you don’t speak to your audience in online advertising nobody will pay any attention to you. You have to really understand the people you’re talking to and the demographics of any websites that you are marketing on. Learning how to speak your audience’s language is a central goal of any skilled marketer.
Tools like Quantcast can provide basic audience demographics on people that you are targeting. Another trick is to go on Yahoo! Answers or Answers.com and look for questions and answers from people in your target demographic. See the language that they’re using, and use the same style in your marketing materials.
3. Social Proof: It would be impossible for me to tell stories on stage about the “Panty Bar” if I didn’t work at Victoria Secret. The reason that humor is credible is because I have the social proof from working there.
In online advertising if you don’t have social proof people won’t take you seriously. Increasing your popularity on social media sites is a great way to boost your social proof, and demonstrates to potential customers that their peers are interested in your brand. If you are marketing a new creative design T-shirt company, a well-curated Facebook page with a thousand likes shows a lot more proof than a page that lacks a good picture. Proofs like this might be enough to convince potential customers to buy your product.
Comedy isn’t very serious, but your audience needs to buy in to the truth behind your jokes for them to be truly funny. Likewise, social proof is incredibly powerful when convincing people to purchase your product.
4. Consistency: In any form of social communication, having a consistent message is of the utmost importance when trying to build trust.
We’ve established that it’s important for people to empathize with you when performing stand-up. For them to do this, you have to establish consistency of both style and position. If you say you’re a religious Jewish person and consistently tell stories from that position you’ll be viewed credibly and reap the laughter that follows. People will care about you, and they’ll find the nugget of truth at the bottom of any great joke that much more credible.
In advertising, this comes through in a few different ways. First of all, you have to be trustworthy. If you promise that you will offer a 100% free trial of this amazing new fat burning product, but later try to charge people for the product by asking they pay for shipping, your message will be inconsistent and you’ll lose customer trust. Second, you have to offer a consistent viewpoint with reliable core values. People want to empathize with brands and interact with brands that care about the same things they care about. Consistent positions and viewpoints increase brand appeal.
Simply put, if you stay consistent people will buy into your message.
Stand-up comedy and online advertising may not seem to have a whole lot in common with one another, but if you look a little closer there’s a surprising amount of overlap. Both require the performer, whether comedian or marketer, to develop an empathic relationship with the audience, speak to them directly and effectively, build social proofs, and establish a consistent message. By doing these things, you’ll dramatically increase your chance of success.
Sometimes it’s possible to find the real truth in things by comparing them to something unexpected, it’s a tactic that you might want to try out sometime.
