What TikTok and a 1,000-year-old cathedral taught me about strategic storytelling.
In 2024, for my MA final project at Teesside University, I designed a multimedia public relations campaign for Durham Cathedral, one of England’s most historic religious and cultural sites, which is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside Durham Castle.
The brief I set myself was this: attract 18 to 24-year-olds to an institution that had never successfully spoken their language.
The platform I chose was TikTok.
The budget was zero.
Why TikTok
At the time of the campaign, TikTok had over one billion monthly active users globally. Forty per cent of its user base fell within the 18- to 24-year-old age group that Durham Cathedral most wanted to reach. The platform’s algorithm, unlike Instagram or Facebook, does not require an existing audience to achieve significant reach. A single well-crafted video can reach tens of thousands of people who have never heard of you.
For an institution with no existing youth audience and no budget, TikTok was not a risk. It was the logical choice.
The insight that changed the campaign
Before I wrote a single word of content, I spent time thinking about why young people were not visiting Durham Cathedral.
It was not because they were uninterested in history. It was not because the Cathedral was irrelevant to their lives. It was because the Cathedral’s communications were written for an audience that already understood why a 1,000-year-old building mattered.
Young people do not start from that place. They start from curiosity, from “why should I care about this?” rather than “I already know I should.”
The gap between the Cathedral and its potential young audience was not relevant. It was language.
Once I understood that, the strategy became clear: stop communicating about the institution and start communicating the human stories inside it. The people who built Durham Cathedral. The people buried beneath its floors. The political conflicts, the religious crises, and the personal dramas played out in its stones over ten centuries.
That is a story a 20-year-old will watch. Not because it is old, but because it is human.
What happened
The campaign generated over 1,800 organic views on TikTok at the time of submission with 8 likes, 4 comments, and 3 shares. Facebook reached 3,977 impressions. With zero paid promotion and no existing audience.
These are not viral numbers. But for a first campaign, with no budget, targeting an audience the institution had never previously engaged, they were significant. And the methodology behind them is scalable.
What I carry into my work with African textile heritage
The lesson from Durham Cathedral shapes everything I do at Ann-Aniedi Asikpo Studio.
African textile heritage faces exactly the same challenge that Durham Cathedral faced. The stories are extraordinary. The history is rich. The cultural depth is remarkable. But most of the potential audience, the African diaspora members who have never been told the full story of their fabric heritage, the global audiences who see Ankara as a print rather than a language, do not yet know why they should care.
The job of multimedia public relations is to close that gap. Not by simplifying the story. By finding the entry point, the human moment, the surprising fact, the personal connection that brings a new audience into contact with something they did not know they needed to understand.
For Durham Cathedral, the entry point was human drama inside a historic building.
For Ankara, the entry point is a woman cutting patterns from memory on a floor in Nigeria.
For Adire, it is the image of Yoruba women in Abeokuta building economic independence through indigo dye and cassava starch.
For Kente, it is the understanding that wearing this fabric is an act of survival.
These are not marketing messages. They are true. They are specific. And they are the kind of stories that make people stop scrolling and start listening.
The tool does not matter. The story does.
The platform I use to tell these stories will change TikTok today, something new tomorrow. Algorithms shift. Platforms rise and fall. What does not change is the fundamental human response to a story told well: attention, connection, and the desire to know more.
That is what Ann-Aniedi Asikpo Studio is built around. Not a platform. A methodology. And a conviction that African textile heritage deserves to be told to the widest possible audience, with the deepest possible care.
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