Fake Festival

Following the success of its April Fool’s Day stunt in 2023, Blenheim Palace challenged us to come up with another quirky, funny and engaging idea. There was minimal budget to spend on the idea in terms of visuals, filming, photography etc so we had to think smart.

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Our embargoed story ‘revealed’ that archivists at Blenheim had unearthed documents which seemed to show a music festival had been held there in 1769 - exactly 200 years before the famous US Woodstock festival. We even threw in Vincent Furnier (aka Alice Cooper) as one of the performers at the 18th century version.

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What we hadn’t banked on, however, was the BBC actually believing the story and running it as a genuine news piece. Once it was revealed as an April Fool’s stunt, coverage went through the roof, with several nationals including it as one of the year’s best April Fool’s Day jokes - putting Blenheim Palace in the same bracket as the likes of Adidas, Dulux and Krispy Kreme.

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