• Brand Xbox
• Project Alpine Legend
• Service Video seeding and social media advertising
• Date 01 April 2009
• Headline 400% uplift in visitors to Xbox.com

Background: Alpine Legend, April Fool

Xbox wanted to make some noise about their sponsorship of the Snowbombing Festival in Austria and highlight just how much fun you can have with Xbox live. AKQA responded with a trailer for a new Xbox game, Alpine Legend, a music game for yodelling fans complete with full-sized alphorn.

Challenge: amaze the masses

Xbox and AKQA asked Unruly Media to get the video out to a mass audience and to create as much buzz as possible, targeting 18-24 casual gamers, not just Xbox's die-hard fanbase.

Solution: April Fools' Day prank

Unruly Media launched the Alpine Legend trailer on April 1st with a blizzard of media activity. Although the spoof game trailer was inherently funny, the viral potential of the clip was massively amplified by its newsworthiness and relevance as an April Fools' Day prank, so it was critical to create instant momentum. Gaming communities were approached with the prank late on 31 March. This was supplemented by one day take-overs on high volume social media applications within Facebook and Bebo.

Result: massive media coverage

• 191,613 plays in 24 hours
• #1 on YouTube
• #5 on Viral Video Chart
• CNN coverage reached 200m households worldwide

Tactical seeding to gaming sites quickly caused a stir amongst the otherwise cynical gaming community. Some people even thought it was a real game, especially since Xbox launched a very official-looking game page on Xbox.com.

Unruly's carpet bombing of social networking sites and Gen Y hangouts helped news about the bizarre new yodelling game explode, quickly reaching mainstream media like The Times, Fox News and CNN, and exposing millions of people to the almighty alphorn. Alpine Legend was Fox TV's favourite April Fool on their gaming news section, the second favourite prank on the Times, and among the top 10 April Fools on the Huffington Post and Kotaku, plus it also made the front pages of Eurogamer, Game Trailers, Brand Republic and Campaign. Broader TV coverage on CNN International extended the reach way beyond our targets, hitting up to 200 million households worldwide.

By April 2, the YouTube upload had received 74 honours, including most viewed in a number of countries and channels, and reached number 5 on the Viral Video Chart.

All this buzz caused traffic to Xbox.com to quadruple, with the game page temporarily surpassing the home page for volume.

Aside: the virtues and pitfalls of perfect timing

On any other day, the viral trigger for Alpine Legend would be humour alone. By launching the video on April Fools Day, high news value and relevance were added to the mix, massively increasing the viral potential of the campaign. With a target window measured in hours, this is a high-risk / high-reward strategy, requiring a well thought out media plan and flawless execution. Get it wrong, and the campaign becomes laughable for all the wrong reasons.

The need for perfect timing illustrates vividly the benefits of paid media within a viral video seeding plan. PR to mainstream media and digital outreach to niche gaming communities might have got Alpine Legend the sort of buzz and coverage achieved here. But being able to prank hundreds of thousands of people on the morning of April 1 ensured that much of the positive noise reaching the ears of bloggers and journalists was authentic word-of-mouth, making high quality coverage significantly more likely.

Agency credits

• Creative: AKQA
• Media: Universal McCann
• Seeding: Unruly Media