Sponsored pranks

Maybe you’ve seen it, but the WSJ has a story today about “The New Pranksters,” meaning groups like Improv Everywhere. Apart from veteran prankster Joey Skaggs cranky but funny assessment of the trend (“”There’s a lot of junk out there calling itself pranks”), the most interesting thing is the stuff toward the end about advertisers and marketers figuring out how to convert these activities into a commercial persuasion tactic:

Some advertisers are starting to see the marketing value of pranks. Taco Bell recently hired [Improv Everywhere and Urban Prankster founder Charlie] Todd to stage a “freeze” in a new restaurant in Flushing, N.Y., where paid extras posing as employees and patrons simply froze in place, baffling the actual customers. The stunt was later used in a viral marketing campaign for the restaurant’s Frutista Freeze drink, and a video of the prank has been viewed 500,000 times online, says Taco Bell spokesman Will Bortz. “We thought it was brilliant,” he says….

Recently Mr. Todd began accepting corporate sponsorships. In exchange for running a Yahoo logo on the video of his coming MP3 pranks, he says the company is paying him a fee, which he plans to use to hire a production team and possibly stage aerial shots. Mr. Todd says he’ll inform participants about Yahoo’s involvement beforehand. “If I work on a corporate thing, there’s going to be a certain percentage of my fan base who thinks it’s evil,” he says. “It’s been a very difficult thing for me to figure out.”