Spoof Ads!

Spoof advertising. Youtube is filled with it, and most of the time it is hilarious! It is amazing to see how people’s creativity shines through in these clips and the way they interpret each ad in different ways. But why is it that people bother to make these spoof ads? Is something in it for them in promoting the brand? Do they purposefully intend to create negativity towards a brand?


The motivations of people who take the time to create content of this type is often unclear. But the issue for many companies out there is how to track these ads and what they are really saying about a brand.

One example is this spoof of our well known “Where the bloody hell are you?” campaign, created by Dan Ilic, an Aussie comedian.

(Please beware it may be offensive but I do hope that you can see the humour :)



If the creators of this Australia campaign saw this spoof, what should they take away from it? This spoof uses humour to play on well known Australian events yet does so in a sarcastic way that undermines the Tourism Australia campaign. While we may laugh, the brand managers can take a lot out of a user-generated ad such as this – to know that perhaps their idea was not as well received by Australians as they had thought.

It seems as though thanks to Youtube and other channels, this is a growing trend and I think companies could benefit a lot from looking into what is out there and perhaps facilitating these ads, as most of the time consumers create what other consumers want to see!

The question is...would a spoof ad have more credibility to a brand than an actual structured marketing campaign? I would say that a lot of the time spoof ads are created by opinion leaders and thus they are probably deemed to be credible by many people out there! Also, people actually take the time to seek out these ads and thus the message resonates more in their mind. I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this topic!