Students are intelligent, cynical, and believe each other, before advertising. Challenging if you’re selling beer. Even more daunting if you’re selling TV Licences. In fact, research confirmed students think having to buy a Licence to watch TV in the UK is “a joke”.We needed a campaign to get students to understand that the consequences of watching TV at university without a licence are far from amusing. Indeed they can be quite serious, with prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000.

Students mistakenly think the TV Licence is a bit of a joke. Truth is, it’s the law. What better way to get them to take it seriously than an idea inspired by students themselves: ‘anti-humour’. Described as, “funny, precisely because it isn’t”, anti-humour’s a fast-growing genre on campus websites. Our campaign uses ‘jokes’ that fall flat at a fact about being unlicensed. Student TV was a powerful way to really bring the idea to life.

‘Anti-humour’ proved as contagious as humour:Four months into the campaign, we had sold more TV Licences to students than in the whole of the previous academic year.

Indeed so far we’ve increased sales by 23% and delivered our highest ever return on investment at 1 : 11.6.We also proved a powerful case for integration: splitting out the response rates, we’ve shown that supporting direct mail activity with other media channels virtually doubled sales.