NZ International Comedy Festival and Colenso BBDO solve the ‘when is it too soon to joke about something?’ dilemma with toosoon search engine

Last year, the NZ International Comedy Festival embarked on an ambitious project. They gathered together an elite team of comedians and mathematicians to solve a riddle that has plagued mankind since the first joke was told.

When is it too soon to joke about something?

The result was toosoon, a remarkable search engine that could actually predict an answer.

VIEW THE CONCEPT

At the heart of the search engine was a complex algorithm. Using your search term, toosoon found millions of current online conversations. It then sampled the tone of those conversations, calculating the positive and negative, to predict an answer. If public sentiment was mostly positive, the topic got an ALL CLEAR. If public sentiment was mostly negative, the topic got a TOO SOON.

If the topic was TOO SOON, the search engine used the collected data to estimate a time and date the result would change.

After five searches, toosoon matched your search terms to upcoming shows.

There’s even a handy mobile version so people can avoid social blunders and buy tickets to Comedy Festival shows on the go.:

Agency: Colenso BBDO

Digital Developer: Paul Headington