If you have to explain a joke, it's not funny

Good old Campaign magazine. This month they ran a conversation between me and Gen Kobayashi of Engine in which I got to talk about my new book, Why Does the Pedlar Sing?. They also took one throwaway line from what I said and, with shrewd journalistic instincts, turned it into their front cover illustration.

It was a sentence that didn't even appear in the edited version of the interview that they printed, only in the full video version: “Everybody talks about how wonderful the TV show Fleabag is and they are quite right. But the audiences for Fleabag are tiny compared with the audiences for Mrs Brown’s Boys, which is a programme that the Fleabag fans probably wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.” I was making a point about how advertising shouldn't be afraid to be popular, and that in my opinion today it was too often just concerned with being fashionable or cool, designed to appeal to the advertising village rather than the great British public. Mrs Brown has been consistently panned by the critics, and I have a strong suspicion most people who work in advertising view it with horror. I'm not a fan myself. But over more than a decade it's topped ratings and its Christmas specials and films outsell just about anything else.

Campaign duly turned the thought into a headline: BE LESS FLEABAG. And on the front cover, with the alternative headline STOP BEING SO CLEVER, was a fine artist's impression of Brendan O'Carroll as The Mammy herself, superimposed on the Mona Lisa.

I think they did a good job. It doesn't by any means encapsulate everything I wanted to say - I have after all just spent 65,000 words doing that for anyone who is interested - but it produced a single, simple image whose meaning would I hope be clear to everyone. And for many, a bit provocative too.

But is today's advertising really too clever, too out of touch?

In the same issue of Campaign is their regular feature, Private View, in which Creative Directors (usually) offer their own critique of the new commercials. This time, to mark Mothers' Day, one page features the opinions of Stacey Bird and Jack Croft, Creative Directors of Wonderhood Studios, while the opposite page has the responses of their mothers, whose professions are given as Physiotherapist and Home Helper.

All the ads in Private View also appear in another regular feature, The Work, in which they are extensively described and explained. So, for instance, Amazon's Super Bowl ad for Alexa is described as follows:

Amazon brings to life virtual assistant Alexa in the body of actor Michael B Jordan, and the results are steamy. After some executives at the tech giant discuss the device's new design, one of them imagines what it would look like in the body of Jordan. She soon falls into a fantasy through a series of romantic vignettes in which she asks Jordan to carry out mundane tasks, such as turning on the sprinklers to create a Notebook-esque moment and reading an audiobook in the bath - to the chagrin of her partner.

There's a great deal of information in this summary. It tells us who Michael B Jordan is (I didn't know), and that the other lead character is meant to be an executive at Amazon. It tells us that the ad is about a new design for Alexa. And it explains the interesting but unobvious conceit that she is fantasising about Alexa being embodied in Jordan's form.

None of this was clear to me on my first viewing of the ad, and I was trying to pay attention. But I have to say that, even after reading the description, I found the ad hard to follow. I still missed any communication of Alexa's new design, whether or not that was meant to be important. And I still don't know what a 'Notebook-esque moment' is, but then I'm rather out of touch.

The Creative Directors liked the ad, and found it funny. Whether or not they'd been primed with the description I don't know, though I suspect they had - that's the way ads are shared among the advertising community today, on websites or on social media, so, rather like going to Covent Garden, you've had the plot of Cosi Fan Tutte Act One explained to you before you begin.

Their mums, however, I imagine came to it cold, the way most people in the real world come across ads. And this is what they thought:

Chris: I don't get it. Why is he in the bath fully clothed?

Tina: Confusing ad, too much innuendo and the Alexa ball seems lost. Quite sexist too!

They don't have a lot to say, but why should they? People don't approach ads as puzzles to be solved. If they don't make immediate sense, and preferably give some kind of satisfaction, they've missed their chance.

Another ingenious and highly wrought piece of work is the campaign for Habito.

Online mortgage company Habito enlisted Rocky Flintstone of My Dad Wrote a Porno to pen an erotic novel ahead of Valentine's Day. The campaign aims to reignite intimacy between couples who are stressed out during the home buying process.... The steamy tale follows first time buyers Sylvia and Tom as they explore mortgage deals, potential houses and each others bodies - giving new meaning to the phrase 'property porn'. Munich based illustrator Sebastian Schwamm created suggestive imagery such as phallic cacti, protruding nipple shaped flowers and seductive keyhole openings.

Again, the amount of information given in the commentary is a good indication of what's not apparent in the ad itself - starting with the facts that the client is called Habito, and that they are an online mortgage company. Someone is clearly meant to be impressed by the names of the writer and illustrator, but it's not the public, who will only be exposed to their actual work. In this case, the ad appeared on our TV screen at home before I had had the chance to study the crib sheet; my wife said 'What the heck was that about?' and I had to admit I hadn't a clue. So I'm sympathetic to the opinions of the Mums, who I'm sure were trying to be as nice as possible:

Chris: This is just too weird. What's it advertising? Something to do with a cat?

Tina: I found this confusing. I can appreciate the artwork but what's it got to do with getting a mortgage?

The Creative Directors, on the other hand, were obviously the real target audience: 'The illustrations are beautiful and we love that they used Rocky Flintstone!'

Both these ads have been lovingly crafted, and perhaps could have - should have - been funny and engaging. And it may be that Chris, Tina, and me and my wife are in a small minority of the dim and uncultured who just don't get it.

But I suspect not. I would guess that for the vast majority of people who come across these ads in the normal cause of their viewing, without a full briefing on what exactly they're meant to be looking out for, for people who may never have heard of Rocky Flintstone or Michael B. Jordan, or a brand called Habito, they will just be confusing and meaningless and therefore irritating.

You only have a few seconds in a video ad to engage your audience and take them with you. You're not making an arthouse movie. If you have to explain anything at all that's going on, you've already failed.

So is today's advertising really too clever, too out of touch? What do you think? Occasionally? Sometimes? Too often?