How we pulled off the prank of 2025
If you happened to be in Melbourne over Grand Final weekend, there’s a good chance you had a moment of genuine cognitive dissonance.
You thought you saw Snoop Dogg. You told someone you’d seen Snoop Dogg. You took a selfie with Snoop Dogg. And even when you were told it wasn’t Snoop Dogg, a small part of your brain refused to accept that. Well, that was all part of a devilish plan. Hannah Nickels and Darren Levin explain.
Just a few weeks before the AFL Grand Final, Treasury Wine Estates and their in-house agency Splash came together with Bolster Group and its sister PR agency Common State to solve a tricky challenge: how do we make 19 Crimes’ Cali by Snoop — the iconic rapper’s eponymous wine brand — the talk of Grand Final weekend?
Snoop himself was coming to Melbourne to perform at the AFL Grand Final, but we only had access to him for one hour at the 19 Crimes’ Cali by Snoop official after party. Enough time to make headlines, but not enough to truly embed him into the cultural moment of the weekend. So instead of trying to stretch that hour thin, we did the next best thing.
We flew Snoop’s official doppelgänger, Eric Finch, over from LA and sent him cruising around Melbourne in a Cali By Snoop–branded lowrider. “Snoop” popped into pubs, bottle shops and local hotspots, shouting Aussies a glass of wine and sparking chaos across the city.
One wonders as to what “Within 72 hours, the campaign had reached more than 17 million people” really means.
I would accept that there were 17m ‘contacts’.
Are they Australian or does it include anyone on our Earth? If a person contacts on a mixture of devices (‘phone, computer, watch, radio, TV etc.? Does that 17m include multiple contacts by the same person which falsely over-counts ‘people’.? Are any ‘scrapers’ also included (mainly bots often exceed people)?
Any answers and explanations?