IWantOneOfThose.com
Fooled? April fun at IWOOT
The brief
1st April and it’s April Fools day. Team Beam, think fun, think driving traffic to the website. Go forth...
The activity
Not exactly the toughest PR job in the world... develop an April Fool for the leading gadget
and gift website IWOOT. Beam developed the concept of the Robogirlfriend and Roboboyfriend.
Beam wrote profiles and feature sets for each of the make believe products. The team then worked
with a fantastic illustration team (Louise and Mark from Aardvart) to devise credible working
drawings of this “must have” gadget. From there on in, it was a case of seeding the
story online with bloggers who were equally up for the joke. Who fooled who in the end?
Ethel from Bognor was apparently quite confused. Ultimately, it was a fun story that spread
across the world wide web faster than you could say Spaghetti Harvest.
The results
Over 40 stories appeared on UK, US, Australian and many European based websites and blogs. Beam also received a request from a well known International newswire agency for an interview with the inventor of the product (so we guess they were fooled?). The Australian business website ITnews.com.au ran the story of IWOOT’s April Fool alongside Google’s, the BBC’s and Nasa jokes.
And the bottom line - traffic to the IWOOT website was up 8 times compared with the previous weeks statistics. Not a bad day’s work.