To insure people against a prank-less April Fool’s day, we invented the Name Your Prank tool, which allows anybody to create and share a credible-sounding - yet wonderfully fake - news stories about themselves. In just two easy steps, folks could generate entertaining news stories personalized with their name and profile picture, and share that story to their newsfeed. With nearly 30 different articles to choose from, people could choose the perfect story for them – whether that was slightly believable or completely unbelievable or both. And each article drove to a fake publication site — complete with fake banners ads to create a realistic experience for viewers. Finally, the fake banner ads and URL at the end of the article led to a page that revealed the prank, and encouraged those who had just been fooled to create their very own share-worthy prank.

The buzz around April Fool’s is short so we needed to get the conversation going quickly. For this one-day event we used paid digital to drive users to the nameyourprank.com site where they could generate their prank and share it with their network. The site became a loop that fed new users into the experience, which led to more shares.

We created and implemented the application, built the microsite that housed it, added Facebook Connect functionality, wrote and designed all 27 discreet article templates, designed the branding for 20 different news sites, and added Google Analytics and Facebook Open Graph tags. Then we ran it all through a thorough QA process. We developed assets for newsfeed ads on Facebook, website cards on Twitter, and banners for third-party media properties. All of these were created and launched at 3am ET (12am PT) on April 1st.

- Over 400,000 articles generated

- The average user generated and engaged with 6 fake articles before sharing

- Sentiment was overwhelming positive on social channels