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 goal was to reactivate the latent love for Carambar, and make the brand top-of-mind in order to boost its sales – but with no media investment.

With as simple PR kit, 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 only 5 days, we generated the equivalent of a full year worth of communication (>150 million contacts), without a penny invested in media.

Sales went up by 10% in one week-end, and continue to explode.

To seed our joke, we sent bloggers a Press Kit that stood out: a colorful school bag containing fake ads (Carambar new “it’s serious” campaign) and a Press Release designed to make the announcement credible, which a blogger posted on Instagram in only 2 hours, starting a wildfire on Twitter. Since Carambar became Trending Topic all day, pseudo-journalists started to label it “the buzz of the week”. Soon after, mass media followed, interviewing kids in front of schools sadden by the news, nostalgic moms criticizing a bad marketing decision, and pundits philosophizing about “the end of innocence”.

To reveal that this operation was just a big, country-wide joke, we posted a video on YouTube showing the backstage of our carefully prepared prank. To leave everyone on a smiley note, we created 80 personal “thank you” videos and sent a huge amount of Carambar to thank bloggers and journalists.

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.

When you have something interesting to say, Twitter is the new Press Conference.

So our communication strategy was to use PR to seed the announcement in the right place.

We realized that nowadays “pop culture” phenomenon propagates from bloggers to pseudo-journalists that comment online buzz, to mass media journalists that are forced to follow a subject when everyone is talking about it.

That’s why we focused our PR effort on key bloggers, hoping mass media would follow (they did).

Also, since we didn’t know how well and how fast the joke will propagate, we created 5 different scenarii to either accelerate the reveal (“#itwasajoke”), or fuel the buzz.

Finally, we filmed the backstage of the operation to make it clear it was a carefully pre-planned joke, not a last minute reversal of brand strategy.