The World's Oldest Jokes

A research based campaign for comedy channel Dave.

Overview
Taylor Herring was briefed to create a noisy and creative news story to drive traffic to Dave’s website and highlight the comedy channel’s stand up season.
 
Execution…
Taking the channel’s strap line – “The Home of Witty Banter” as our starting point, we worked with Dr Paul McDonald from the University of Wolverhampton on a piece of research to discover the World’s top 10 oldest jokes, the UK’s oldest joke and the UK’s oldest one liner.
We also flagged up the story in advance to allow news agencies and national press to illustrate it with pictures of the Exeter Codex.
The full list of jokes was also made available on the Dave website and the aim was to get as much online coverage to either mention this or provide a direct link to the site. For our media day we also made sure that every broadcast interview carried a full credit pointing towards stand-up programming on the channel.

Results
The story was hugely popular across national newspapers with fully credited pieces running in The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Metro, The Daily Record, Daily Sport and The Scotsman. Dr Paul McDonald, who carried out the research, was in great demand on the day and featured on BBC Breakfast in two separate slots, BBC Midlands Tonight, Sky News Radio, the BBC World Service and 31 UK local radio stations. The story was also discussed and credited on BBC Radio 2 and Kiss 100 FM’s breakfast show.

The findings of the Dave Historical Humour Study also proved a massive hit online with fully credited pieces being featured on numerous sites including AOL.com, Yahoo.co.uk, The Sun Online, The Mail Online, The Mirror.co.uk, Telegraph.co.uk and Metro.co.uk. We also surpassed our original target by getting 90% of online coverage to credit the Dave website or provide a link directly to it.

Media from far afield as Australia, China, India, Canada and America also picked up on the story and online pieces also featured on China Daily.com, ABC Australia, The Economic Times – India, TV New Zealand, City News California and International Business Times New York amongst others.

Our campaign reached more than 196 million people and is still being quoted and spoken about to this day.

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The client said...

Fantastic Dave coverage from the oldest joke stunt –super impressed with the amount of interviews. Thanks!Zoe Clapp, UKTV Publicist
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