It’s hard to get people to stop and read an ad in a newspaper and when it’s an ad for the newspaper itself the chances are even lower.

We needed to pump new life into a photo competition for the global newspaper Metro. Dwindling numbers and a lack of attention needed to stop.

People share stories and images online like never before, but it’s the mistakes, the “fails”, that burn the trail across the social networks. So we gave them what they wanted; we created a mistake that they could all talk about. We printed the entire Metro edition without images. Everyone was talking about the mistake, but they also reflected on how important images really are.

Starting with our own media we printed an entire edition without any images.

Moments after hitting the streets we could feel the buzz, people were even taking extra copies to show their friends.

When our story hit the social networks things really heated up. The 'fail' spread through Twitter, the blogosphere and Facebook, all blazing with stories and images of our mistake.

Then the media cast its gaze our way. TV stations showed the paper and mocked us, Radio stations talked about never having images anyway.

Everyone reveled in our mistake.

The next day we told the truth and asked all of our readers “where you missing something in your paper yesterday?”

A public explanation of our media stunt gained us a round more of social and media attention, this time we were laughing; watching people sign up to our photo challenge like never before.

All with no media budget!

The no-picture campaign created a lot of buzz - earned and shared media. And the website traffic and actually contributions to the photo challenge went up by several hundred percent.