We decided the best way to get everyone talking was to scare them on Halloween night. We harnessed the power of TV and the latest technology to whip up a social media storm that would last 4 days. Each night we ran stunts live on air during TG4's 7pm news broadcasts. And then seeded the footage on social media channels.

On the first night, we made their weather presenter Caitlín Nic Aoidh vanish during a freak lightning storm. On the second night we hijacked the news to run a fake missing persons report on her disappearance. On night three, her digital doppelganger (created in Adobe Character Animator beta) took her place on the weather. And on night four, Caitlín returned to tell the imposter to get her own show.

Which she did. Becoming a firm favourite on the TG4 player.

TG4 gave us full access to their studios and staff.

All of our stunts aired live on the station during their primetime news programming each evening (Monday through Thursday). The first stunt used a combination of live footage from the weather and pre-recorded videos on Snapchat (Snapalytics). These were both seeded on Twitter and Facebook immediately after the stunt to maximise exposure.

We continued to use the same approach all week.

After Caitlín's disappearance, she went into hiding, continuing the prank by ‘going dark’ across all of her social media accounts. TG4’s press office got in on the act too, denying knowledge of her whereabouts.

All animated parts of the campaign were created in the days before they went live, to ensure that the weather information within them was accurate.

We actively tried to re-engage news sources that talked about the first stunt by showing them the following pranks too.

During the campaign we spent only €500 on media and achieved huge success. Our original lightning strike trended in the UK & Ireland and had a reach on social of 20 million people. This included a reach on Twitter of 4.5million and a social spread on of an additional 5.2 million as well as 4,406 unique mentions globally. On YouTube, we saw over 1million views on third party videos. Facebook had 1,272,793 organic impressions of TG4 content. We almost doubled TG4's Snapchat fanbase (196%), which each snap during the campaign receiving 296,000 views.

Featured on Huffington Post, Mashable, CNN, Digital Spy, BBC, all Irish news sites and tweeted by celebrities globally (including Guy Kawasaki).

Results driving to the VOD player:

Promoted video link ads on Facebook/Instagram from November - December (total media spend: €3,379) achieved:

779,918 people reached at frequency of 3.05; 2,376,898 impressions; 15,938 full video views, 10,079 CTR