Our Big Wrap-Up

By: Karianne Johnsen & Julia Sprowls

With today being our last full day in London, International Wit sat down to reflect upon our overall travel experience and the final research findings we’ve compiled throughout the semester. We wanted to share our final takeaways on how humor is perceived in different cultures and how it is used in advertising and public relation campaigns and strategies in the United States compared to the United Kingdom and Ireland.

As a recap from the professional interviews we conducted in Ohio, we found the ways humor is used depends heavily on the client and the overall tone of their product or service. We analyzed various campaigns and saw there were several similarities in the way humor was used to create an emotional connection between the brand and its audience. However, we found that sometimes humor can be interpreted wrong based on cultural meaning. In short, do your research beforehand!

Live While We’re Young

By: Bailey Purpura

Check out some of the fun activities we did while exploring London and Dublin. We got the opportunity to explore the streets of some amazing places. Some would say we were getting lost in all the right places. Those people would be right. We definitely had the experience of a lifetime.

Live in London

By: Danie Minor and Ryan Wilzoch

While in London, International Wit got the chance to explore the city. Team members all had different things they loved doing and seeing. In this “newscast” below, each of our team members shared one of their favorite activities that they have done while in the city and one of their favorite activities that we have done as a group with other members of the Global Ad and PR class.

International Wit team members all are individually unique, so naturally we all had different favorite activities that we did while in the city! Check out our “newscast” down below.

An Advertising, Public Relations, and Marketing day in Birmingham

By: Julia Sprowls 

Member of the education team, Curtis Allen preparing to talking with our class.

We had the privilege to get an inside look into the marketing of one of England’s largest snack food providers, Cadbury. The Cadbury family chocolate sales started in 1840 and have grown rapidly since then. Curtis Allen from the educational marketing team walked us through some of Cadbury’s advertisements and marketing strategies over the years. He showed us brands and advertisements we don’t see in the U.S., as well as competitor trends and how they learn from them.

London Agency Experience

By: Danie Minor and Karianne Johnsen 

Global Ad and PR students watching the presentation given by Jed Hallam.

Three of our team members visited Mindshare UK on Tuesday where they met with Jed Hallam, the head of digital strategy. He spoke about his career background, agency history and global communication experience. Afterwards, on behalf of International Wit, team members asked his take on how Mindshare positions client campaigns to reflect different cultural contexts, specifically humor, as a global agency with some key global brands.

Tá for Grá—Yes for Equality

By: Ryan Wilzoch

If you hadn’t heard, Ireland voted on its same-sex referendum on Friday, May 22^nd. International Wit had the unique opportunity to visit Ireland just before the vote. It was difficult finding humorous posters and advertisements on such a serious topic. Luckily, we got a tip from an awesome professor who found the perfect video of comedians from all over the world using humor to support marriage equality.

The video linked below is a variety of comedians from all over the world, all supporting the marriage referendum. South African comedian, Trevor Noah said same-sex marriage needed to be legalized so the pain and suffering of marriage can be shared equally among all people. Jack Dee, an English comedian pretends as if he is repulsed not only by same-sex marriage, but heterosexual marriage as well, claiming a woman and man together make him “sick.”

Publicis Dublin

By: Ryan Wilzoch

A few of our team members, Karianne and Ryan, got the chance to check out an international ad agency in Dublin on Monday, called Publicis. There, Karianne and Ryan were able to speak with a variety of professionals, one of which was Ian, who works in Client Services. Karianne plans to pursue a career in client services so it was incredibly beneficial for her. Both, Ryan and Karianne were able to reference many of the different campaigns Publicis mentioned such as: Bill Bernbach’s VW Beetle ads as well as Hunky Dory. Does that sound familiar? We did a post on it not too long ago. Click here if you missed it.

Check out this quick video to explain a little more:

Dublin Stand-ups

By: Julia Sprowls 

We’ve been studying and analyzing humor differences for an entire semester now, and on Monday night we finally got to experience the humor firsthand.

A classic Dublin pub called Stag’s Head hosted a free comedy show called Comedy Crunch in its basement. The opening acts were Irish and British, and the headliner, Michael Harrison, was Canadian. It was a small venue, so the comedians interacted with the crowd throughout the show. Our group of American tourists stood out against the crowd, so we had the chance to say where we were from and why we were there. Each of the five stand-up comedians made jokes about the Americans in the crowd and Americans in general. Actually, most of the jokes involved racism. Each comedian made fun of themselves as well as other races and ethnicities they knew were in the crowd. As the show went on, our research was confirmed when we heard the Irish dry humor. We heard the comedians making fun of themselves, just as we learned earlier in the semester from our interviews.

A Storyful Day

By: Bailey Purpura

Today, our lead writer Julia and I visited Storyful, a social media news company in Dublin. This company is based in many locations all around the world including New York and Hong Kong, and their main goal is to discover content to send off to newsrooms all across the globe, mainly the United States. They provide news content for CNN, Good Morning America, The Today Show, ABC, The New York Times and more.

I Got It From My Mama

By: Danie Minor 

My mom, Beth Kaufman, is a comedian. She performs standup comedy up and down the east coast. She found her true love for comedy in a not-so-funny situation.

Six years ago, my mom was diagnosed with stage 3B breast cancer. She had to go through grueling chemotherapy, radiation and over 10 surgeries. While sitting in chemo one day, she decided she wanted to do something fun with the rest of her life. So, she finally round up the courage to go to an open-mic night for standup comedy! She had never stepped on stage before but once she did, she found her true calling.