Carambar is a French candy bar, famous for the 'jokes' written on its wrapping-paper since 1969.

The brand recently started to lose a bit of its iconic edge, so we decided to push the joke further to remind an entire nation why they love Carambar: we conceived the first social-media-powered joke… to an entire country.

We announced that Carambar was about to replace its famous jokes with school exercises.

Obviously, it created uproar from the entire nation, which suddenly remembered why and how much they love Carambar – and how sad a world without fun will be.

In a typical French manner, people that used to criticize the quality of the Carambar jokes were now petitioning like it was an endangered species… until we revealed #itwasajoke.

In only 5 days, we generated the equivalent of a full year of communication… without a penny

invested.

The media strategy was all about seeding the announcement in the right place to create the fastest and biggest echo effect. Our insight was that nowadays “pop culture” phenomenon propagates from bloggers to journalists, not the other way around, and that the new grail is the speed of information, more than information itself.

That’s why to seed our joke we used a blend of social media and PR, sending some fake ads and a press release developed to make the announcement credible… which ended up organically on Instagram in 2 hours, starting a wildfire on Twitter.

We filmed the backstage of our prank (our Situation Room where we monitored the propagation), and posted the video on Youtube to reveal that the end of the Carambar joke was actually just another big, country-wide joke.

Then we released a compilation of the most hilarious, heart-broken tweets people had originally written.

We drove France crazy. Carambar became the most discussed topic on Twitter just two hour after we seeded the fake announcement. In the following days, 100% of the 20th biggest national media covered the story: 950 media mentions in 5 days! Seventeen petitions were spontaneously created. Someone even changed Carambar's Wikipedia page. In total, we generated the equivalent of a full year worth of communication (> 150 millions contacts) in 5 days, without a penny invested in media. Sales went up by 10% in one week-end, before our annual « 50 cents off » promotion even hit.