The secret is out. The egg is broken.
In case you missed it, The New York Times had the scoop on the “world_record_egg” last night ready for your post-game perusal.
You should really read the whole thing, and we won’t recap it all here. But there are some key takeaways:
- The person who first came up with the idea is an agency creative (surprise!) named Chris Godfrey who works at The&Partnership London
- The growth of the project was entirely organic, but of course brands were interested in paying for exposure
- The egg team finally agreed to set up a partnership with Hulu after they were introduced to vp of brand marketing Nick Tran by Jason Peterson … the same Jason Peterson who recently departed Havas and set up his own Instagram-powered content operation, The Times
- In another piece of amusing minutiae, Godfrey said VaynerMedia DTC lead Nik Sharma’s estimate that a brand collaboration with the egg would be worth “at least $10 million” overshot the mark by a bit
One more thing we should note: the Atlantic piece quoting Sharma also mentioned that the egg team was working “in an unofficial capacity” with Jerry Media, the notorious joke thieves of #fuckfuckjerry fame.
The Times story makes no such mention.
And as you probably know by now, the final ad had nothing to do with promoting Hulu itself. According to these other reports, the client simply signed a deal to air what turned out to be a mental health PSA exclusively on Hulu at 11 PM last night.
At this time, it’s unclear how much Hulu paid for the ad and what it might be worth to the streaming service. But it was certainly an interesting experiment in the proven power of virality, wasn’t it?
One also can’t help but think quite a few people who work in advertising (and media) might relate to the spot.
We’ve reached out to Godfrey, Jerry Media, Peterson, and his agency The Times for comment. We will update this story if and when we learn more.
And now for our own patronizing PSA: please subscribe to the all publications you read regularly. It’s really not that much money.
