Creating Viral Moments with April Fools Campaigns

Content

min read

Background

This project was completed during my time as Web Marketing Manager at Toshiba where I worked from 2007 until 2012.

Toshiba is a consumer electronics brand that sold laptops, TVs, DVD players, and other technology products until 2018.

Challenge

At Toshiba, one of our top objectives year in and out had been to humanize the brand and shift the perception of Toshiba away from one that was viewed as cold and industrial. We ran a TV ad with T-Pain in 2010, and even produced Hollywood’s first social film, The Beauty Inside, which ultimately won an Emmy.

In 2009, I pitched the idea of launching a fake product for Toshiba’s first April Fools campaign. After all, at the time, it was mostly the cool kids like Google and Facebook that were doing it so why not be a part of that conversation? With some initial hesitation, the pitch was approved and, at least for our first campaign, I would receive no budget.

Solution

I created a playbook for our April Fools campaigns to make sure that what we put out there was aligned to business objectives.

Every campaign would feature a landing page announcing the launch of a new and innovative but obviously fake product.
Distribution could only through owned channels, no paid, to truly test virality.
The fake product had to tie in, in some way, to an emerging tech trend or company focus.
The product had to straddle the line between believability and absurdity, but push slightly into absurdity.
I would concept and write the entire thing in secret, and work with a designer at the 11th hour to build and launch the page. This was done to build excitement and anticipation internally.

Below are each of 4 campaigns that I would produce between 2009 and 2012.

Toshiba PetBook K9 (2009)

The first campaign involved only a landing page and announced the PetBook K9, a laptop made for dogs. It was promoted only via the homepage hero, and just for one day.

Toshiba TubeTop (2010)

Fresh off the announcement of a new line of laptops that featured wipeable keyboards, it only made sense to launch an inflatable laptop. The success of the PetBook K9 campaign got us budget approval for a video and yes, we somehow managed to get the thing to inflate in real-time using an off-screen air compressor!

🎥 Watch the Toshiba TubeTop Video

Toshiba Spectacle (2011)

In 2011, we had internally merged our laptop and TV divisions and the emerging technology at the time was 3DTVs. Naturally, we took that a step further and “launched” Toshiba Spectacle, the world’s first 3D monocle. With two successful prior campaigns under out belt, our budget doubled so I had a product prototype made and produced a Hollywood caliber TV ad with movie trailer voiceover. By this time, we had become known within the mainstream tech press for our annual prank and employees were begging to be a part of it, including one of our SVPs who was featured in the landing page hero.

🎥 Watch the Toshiba Spectacle Video

Shapes by Toshiba (2012)

Just a few months prior, we had entered the Android tablets market. To generate more product awareness for them, we “launched” Shapes by Toshiba for our April Fools campaign in 2012. The landing page and video promoted individual expression, featuring a line of Android tablets that unlike the oh-so-standard rectangle, came in shapes and sizes to match the uniqueness of you. This would be the final April Fools prank that I would produce for Toshiba, as I left the company in 2012.

🎥 Watch the Shapes by Toshiba Video

Results

Each campaign received significant traffic spikes, though they did not persist beyond the first few days of April each year
These campaigns got picked up by nearly all major media outlets as well as the tech press (see “Press Coverage” at the end of the article)
We received hundreds of positive notes and comments from customers and partners about our campaigns

Takeaways

While it’s really impossible to attribute any sort of direct line back to revenue with these campaigns, they each generated hundreds of thousands of single day pageviews and video views, all organically.
Perhaps most importantly, they created a great sense of positivity and optimism internally within the company. In fact, I still get messages every year in April from former colleagues wondering if I’m still producing them (I’m not).
In 2011, Toshiba shipped nearly 18M laptop units, the best year in company history, and I have to believe efforts like this helped in some way.