The Forgotten Point of Advertising: Getting Famous
Founder and Head of Growth, White Label Comedy
The original point of top-line advertising was simple: make your brand famous. Become the best-known name in your market and it is almost impossible not to make money. Somewhere along the way that got forgotten, buried under clicks and conversion rates. The fastest way to get famous today is to be entertaining, and the easiest way to be entertaining is to be funny.
What advertising was always for
Before social media gurus arrived, everyone in advertising knew the job of a top-line campaign was to make you famous. That was it. Not to squeeze out a 0.3% lift on a landing page, but to make your brand the first name people think of in your category.
How else do you explain WHSmith getting so big while selling the strange combination of sandwiches, pencil sharpeners and paperback novels? Fame does a lot of heavy lifting. Ask most people today what top-line advertising is for and you get a blank look, which is exactly why the opportunity is still wide open.
Why famous brands find it hard to lose
When you are the most famous brand in your market, buying from you becomes the default. People reach for the name they recognise, recommend the name they recognise, and forgive the name they recognise when it slips up.
That is the whole game. Get famous enough and sales stop being a fight and start being a habit. Everything else, the offers, the funnels, the clever targeting, works better when the brand is already known.
Why funny is the fastest route to famous
You can become famous the slow, expensive way, or you can be entertaining. Entertainment spreads on its own, and the most reliable form of entertainment is comedy, because everyone likes funny people and funny brands.
"I do not like them, they are too funny," said nobody, ever. A genuinely funny brand gets shared, remembered and talked about, which is fame arriving for free rather than fame you rent by the impression.
Meet Brian
Getting famous by being funny is a repeatable skill, not a lucky accident. Brian is our AI-powered comedy marketing machine, built to help you turn your brand voice into content that gets noticed and shared, without spending six years learning to write jokes.
Take Brian for a spin and start building the kind of fame that makes selling easy.
Adam Hunt
Founder and Head of Growth at White Label Comedy. He spends his days convincing serious brands that funny is the most profitable thing they're not doing.
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