In 2018, BBC Marketing and Audiences approached semiotic agencies with a challenging brief. They wanted to know the following: What makes modern Britain laugh? The BBC’s younger audiences have been steadily drifting to other platforms and broadcasters to satisfy their need for “funny stuff.” Brands that successfully leverage humor really resonate with this new modern mainstream audience, for example, Netflix, BuzzFeed, YouTube, Snapchat, and so on. The BBC, as part of its remit to continue to be a modern evolving brand, wanted to address this trend by understanding what types of comedy content convey a relatable sense of humor and how to best achieve this. The BBC required insight on the following key objectives:

• Identify key characteristics of content that younger audiences find funny;

• Explain how this compares with the preferences of the BBC’s older audiences;

• Estimate how far the BBC brand can stretch in humor content across platform;

• Assess the need for innovation across BBC platforms to accommodate fresh content.

The project involved a multi-methodology approach, the centerpiece of which was a content analysis of 800 data points of consumer generated content derived from WhatsApp diaries. The semiotic analysis, informed by foundational thinking on humor schools and humor psychology, used an innovative hashtagging system to create a nuanced taxonomy of the mostly memes and viral videos with the primary types (e.g., #cringe, #pastiche, #awkwardness, #black humour, #satire, #schadenfreude etc.). The BBC received a comprehensive taxonomy of more than 50 humor types, a digest of levers of engagement for operationalising the humour, and maps for strategic channel positioning. The work has helped the BBC innovate in three core areas: rethinking their use of metadata for tagging comedy content on the iPlayer platform, modifying their tone of voice across all parts of the business, and in commissioning original comedy podcasts for the BBC Sounds app.

在2018年，BBC营销和受众群体向具有挑战性的简报的符号学机构咨询。他们想知道以下内容：是什么使现代英国大笑？英国广播公司（BBC）的年轻观众一直在稳步转向其他平台和广播公司，以满足他们对“有趣的东西”的需求。成功利用幽默的品牌确实引起了这一新的现代主流受众的共鸣，例如Netflix，BuzzFeed，YouTube，Snapchat等。BBC作为继续发展成为现代品牌的职责之一，希望通过了解哪些类型的喜剧内容传达出相关的幽默感以及如何最好地实现这一目标来应对这一趋势。英国广播公司需要洞悉以下关键目标：

• 确定年轻观众觉得有趣的内容的关键特征；

• 说明与英国广播公司年长观众的喜好相比如何；

• 估算BBC品牌可以在整个平台上扩展幽默内容的程度；

• 评估跨BBC平台进行创新以适应新内容的需求。

该项目涉及一种多方法论方法，其核心是对来自WhatsApp日记的消费者生成内容的800个数据点进行内容分析。对符号学的分析基于对幽默流派和幽默心理学的基础思考，使用了创新的标签系统来创建主要类型（例如＃cringe，＃pastiche，＃awkwardness，＃black）的大多数模因和病毒视频的细微分类法。幽默，＃讽刺，＃schadenfreude等）。英国广播公司（BBC）收到了50多种幽默类型的综合分类法，摘录了幽默操作的互动杠杆摘要，以及战略性渠道定位地图。这项工作帮助BBC在三个核心领域进行了创新：重新考虑了他们使用元数据在iPlayer平台上标记喜剧内容，