Amusement

The use of amusement features such as humor in traditional advertising has been a complex topic due to mixed findings from over a quarter century's research on humorous ads (Weinberger & Gulas, 1992). However, research has shown humor does attract attention and seems to be most effective in ads promoting low-risk routine purchases (Weinberger, Spotts, Campbell & Parsons, 1995). In a series of field studies, Scott, Klein, and Bryant (1990) find humorous fliers increase attendance at social events like neighborhood picnics and clambakes but have little effect on attendance of business gatherings.

Wells, Leavitt and McConville (1971) find — along with vigor, personal relevance, and irritation — humor is a major perceptual dimension in their profiling of user responses to TV commercials. The adjectives that accounted for this factor include jolly, merry, playful, humorous and amusing. They believe humor contributes to perceived entertainment, even though it does not necessarily score high on personal relevance.

Additionally, when a Web surfer is engaged in low-risk message processing, peripheral cues like humor may be used and can succeed in gaining visitor attention as they do in traditional media (Weinberger et al., 1995). A more likable interface will also encourage visitors to visit more pages and stay longer, and hence nurture a more positive attitude.

Ducoffe's (1996) entertainment factor is based on audience needs for escapism, diversion, aesthetic enjoyment, or emotional release. Humor fulfills most, if not all of these needs: a diversion because of its incongruous nature, emotional releases like laughing, temporary escapism, and enjoyment. The conceptualization of this dimension is closely in line with some earlier user profiling studies in advertising. From a pool of 600 adjectives, Aaker and Bruzzone (1981) identify four factors that explain the majority of variance in predicting informative, enjoyable, annoying, or offensive ads. In particular, amusing/humorous did not break out as a separate factor but contribute to 37.6 percent of the variance explained by the factor "entertainment." Examination of the 25 most entertaining commercials, each of which scored two standard deviations above the average, reveals that "amusing/humorous" is the predominant part of the factor. In particular, none of the most amusing commercials scored low on the "entertainment" factor. These amusing commercials involve a comedian interacting with children, animated characters, and conversations that had a "touch of warmth and quiet humor" (p. 21).

Humor's intention is to amuse and entertain people, to make them laugh, and to convey light-hearted enjoyment (Morkes, Kernal & Nass, 1999). Morkes et al. (1999) define humor to be "an incongruous comment that is recognized by the receiver as an attempt to amuse and that succeeds at amusing" (p. 403). Humor is found to enhance the likability of the computer interface and has a positive effect on user cooperation (Morkes et al., 1999). Based on the above discussion, we ague the use of humor contributes positively to the entertainment value of Websites.

In addition to entertainment, humor also helps gain attention and comprehension, especially when humor is related to the products presented (Speck, 1991). Many studies have been devoted to the effect of thematic and structural relatedness of humor to a message (Weinberger et al., 1995). Here "thematic" refers to humor's relationship with product themes and "structural" refers to the integration of humor with product claims (Speck, 1991). When ad effectiveness was measured through reader or viewer recall and comprehension, both related and unrelated humor have been found to have a positive effect (Ziv, 1988; Chapman & Crompton, 1978; Scott et al., 1990; Zillmann, Willians, Bryant, Boynton & Wolf, 1980). However, related humor was found to be superior to unrelated humor when direct comparison studies were conducted (Kaplan & Pascoe, 1977). Measures of recall and comprehension reflect the ad's effectiveness at getting product-related messages across to the viewer, which implies a more informative message to the visitor. Weinberger et al. (1995) found a positive relationship between related humor and attention and comprehension in low risk products. Attention and comprehension contribute to the delivery of information contained in a message and lead to more informative perceptions of advertised products. No use of humor in Web advertising or Web pages have been studied in the past. This study will extend advertising from the traditional media to the Web, and study the impact of humor on attention and comprehension (perceived informativeness) of products. Thus, we also argue that the amusement effect contributed by product-related humor also enhances the perceived informativeness of a Website about its products.