Winner: Beano, Beano Studios
Beano needed to find a fresh way to keep building the brand in 2019, a year after its bumper 80th birthday celebrations and as the UK prepared for a final decision on Brexit. The kids’ title has always had a history of humour and jokes, so it seemed the perfect time to remind everyone about the importance of having fun.
The marketing team’s objectives included "to own" search engine optimisation around "jokes" and drive growth of Beano.com, to boost the brand’s primary-school teacher network and drive uptake of curriculum-linked Beano school lesson plans, and to keep growing subscriptions and newsstand sales of the comic.
The solution was "SPAG LOLZ" lesson plans – a series of free download packs, including cartoons, animations, comics, jokes and activity challenges, for school teachers and parents to use to support kids in the art of joke-writing telling. The content was devised in line with KS1 and KS2 curriculum guidelines on spelling, punctuation and grammar, so that it would be suitable for the classroom.
Schools could enter a competition to find Britain’s funniest class – with Beano targeting teachers by using media partners such as The Times Educational Supplement, Teach Primary and digital marketing through Facebook advertising.
A survey to find the 10 funniest jokes of all time helped to generate additional PR coverage (the winning joke was: Why was the sand wet? Because the sea weed!).
Traffic to Beano.com increased by 2,000% during the voting period, the number of teachers signing up to Beano’s newsletter rose 340% and the campaign achieved more than 600 pieces of media coverage.
There was a clear business outcome as weekly comic subscriptions increased by 680% compared with the average increase.
Shortlisted:
Subscriptions marketing team, Immediate Media