Comic relief: injecting humour into essential but dry service videos

The challenge: no one knows what we do

Business Services were concerned that academic and professional staff at the University weren’t accessing the essential services they offered. A team led by Client Services Director, Chris van der Weyden and Senior Manager Ning Luo set out to rectify this problem.

“From the beginning, this project was about making staff aware of how we could help with everyday queries. It was to be a genuine public service announcement,” said Chris.

Chris and Ning knew they wanted to promote the catch-all 40888 number so that the academic and staff community would have a clear point of contact when they faced everyday technical hurdles in IT and cybersecurity, facilities, health and safety, finance or HR.

By the time they reached out to Video and Media (VM), the Business Services team had already done a lot of groundwork.

“We did a lot of consulting with the service delivery team and sifted out the most common challenges that staff at the University face, which are issues that are always there,” Ning told us. “But it was dry, so we knew we needed attention-grabbing videos that would raise awareness of our services and that we could share with new staff members in years to come.”

Although the Business Services team was very clear about their objectives, they needed creative inspiration and technical guidance from VM on the format that their suite of videos should take.

The solution: taking risks with comedy

After the initial meetings, VM assigned senior video producer Sascha White to explore audience-centred approaches and creative ideation with the Business Services project team.

Ning and Chris wanted their videos to attract attention, so Sascha suggested they use a comedian to help make the common, every-day scenarios more memorable.

They decided on comedian and scriptwriter Andy Matthews who was a familiar and reassuring face around the University, having appeared in the COVIDSafe Campus videos during the pandemic lockdowns. Sascha and Andy worked together on the scripts to develop entertaining comedic hooks for the scenarios.

They came up with three video series that had distinct and entertaining visual styles. Campus Fire Tales tells scary stories about IT fails; the Service Now Action Team (S.N.A.T) comes to the rescue whenever things break down; and a Playschool-style segment called Once Upon a Timetable demonstrates who to call when a classroom is disrupted.

Getting staff members familiar with the Service Now number 40888 was also an important part of the brief. Sascha bought in his musician colleague Ben Loveridge to compose a jingle that had the potential to become an earworm.

As an internal campaign, there was some scope for the team to take creative risks, however a rigorous pre-production approval process with key stakeholders was agreed upon so that production could go ahead without hesitation when it was all signed off.

The VM team pitched their concepts to Business Services and they loved it. Once they had all the scripts, storyboards and jingle approved, Sascha and the VM team went into production. The result was a suite of nine videos, plus a bonus montage video for promotion.

The outcome: standing out lands with the audience

Most of the videos have now been distributed on the University’s Staff Hub, Business Services web pages and via other internal channels, as well as via faculty networks. Sascha and the VM team advised a staggered release timeline to maximise the impact and longevity for the videos.

The feedback from the University community has been overwhelmingly positive, with the common observation that the Service Now videos are memorable because they are quirky, funny and different to other internal communications.

“The issues that the staff faced in the videos could be really identified with,” said Chris. “From our perspective, these videos represent money well spent to reduce time delays for our services and make staff and academics feel like they’re being supported as a valued part of our community.”