How do you get the big internet mass to watch something that is basically brand promotion? The solution – a Photoshop prank.

Adobe is the global leader in digital marketing and digital media solutions. In order to create purchase intent for Creative Cloud and to strengthen Adobe’s position as a creative brand, Adobe arranges live-streamed online events called Create Now Creative Days for the Nordic countries.

With a 40,000 EURO budget, Adobe asked us to use creativity to increase the number of attendees to the event by 100%, to 12 000 current and prospective customers.

Using custom built software, a hidden camera crew and the Photoshop artist Erik Johansson, we surprised commuters by secretly photographing them while they were waiting for the bus, and then photoshopped them into amusing situations and implied relationships, the whole process shown in real-time in the bus shelter ad space. We also captured their priceless reactions which ranged from wonderment to sheer laughter.

To spread the film we used no traditional purchased media. Instead, we aimed for getting the video spread in earned media. The film was launched only on YouTube. To get a snowball effect, we used the scant media budget of 5.800 euro to engage bloggers to write about and spread the film. To keep the communication linked over different social media, we used the hashtag #CreativeDay

We posted the film on Adobe’s different Facebook and Twitter channels, as well as on Erik Johansson’s Facebook page and Twitter. The film had a huge effect on the market and reached a lot more people then the originally target of 12,000 online visitors. In total, the online event got 73,538 unique visitors, a 613 % increase.

With more than 8.3 million views in 3 days the film became one of the biggest viral successes in Sweden. More than 20 million viewers in 233 different countries saw it YouTube. It got featured on CNN, Al Jazeera, Discovery and Fox, as well as influential websites like Gizmodo, Mashable and the Huffington Post. It became nr 1 on AdAge’s Viral Video Chart over the world’s most viral ads. The film also got 756,338 Facebook shares. In total, the prank reached 180 million people and got a PR-value of over 12 million Euro.