Meet, Chaz. Your typical Jersey reject turned closet hipster.

Here’s a photo of him buying diet juice and trying to be cool with the shopping basket. He’s literally asking to be pranked, right?

All joking aside, he is quite a talented designer and a great friend of ours. He actually illustrated our logo, and has a bunch of great work on his Dribbble profile. [Insert Shameless Chaz Plug Here: @chazrusso] All of this combined made him the perfect target.

In the midst of our routine of moderately insensitive office pranks, we felt the need to turn the dial up a bit. We wanted to see if we could do something so clever and so technical that our inter-office pranking would never be the same again. Our plan was to highlight the only thing that Chaz was openly proud of and what he did to make a living.

We set out to create the illusion that a public website was taking his work and showing it off as being the worst design that the internet had to offer. In reality, the website, subsequent ads, and all of our content was going to be seen by only those that new him best- his friends and colleagues. We’re great friends, we know.

The following case study illustrates how we were able to undermine everything that our friend has worked towards and play our most elaborate joke to date using nothing but programmatic Facebook ads, a WordPress hosted site, and some virality- all for less than $40.

The Setup: