"Newsweek reports on the zombie invasion of New York".
I buried a Konami code in the ad integration JavaScript (no one wants to code review that) which flipped all the stories on the homepage for zombie invasion stories. The authors were all members of the dev and project manager teams. You can still Google it.
I did not get fired, for a couple reasons. One, I disabled all the ads, so there was no negative brand association. Two, we'd just launched a redesign and our homepage traffic skyrocketed from 45,000 views / day to 750,000 views a day. My personal highlight was receiving a mention on NPR morning edition.
My general manager "scolded" me in public, but privately was thrilled at the several hundred thousand dollars worth of free marketing. I figured I'd hang my hat up there.
That’s the one! A fun two days of my life tracking all the places it popped up. There was a lot of speculation at the time that it was a marketing ploy by the company, which is definitely not the case. Newsweek was a very old school company run by people not good at or willing to understand the Internet. A shame, because the people who reported to them were full of great ideas.
I buried a Konami code in the ad integration JavaScript (no one wants to code review that) which flipped all the stories on the homepage for zombie invasion stories. The authors were all members of the dev and project manager teams. You can still Google it.
I did not get fired, for a couple reasons. One, I disabled all the ads, so there was no negative brand association. Two, we'd just launched a redesign and our homepage traffic skyrocketed from 45,000 views / day to 750,000 views a day. My personal highlight was receiving a mention on NPR morning edition.
My general manager "scolded" me in public, but privately was thrilled at the several hundred thousand dollars worth of free marketing. I figured I'd hang my hat up there.