I think the most sophisticated practical joke I ever played growing up was on my parents.  I was about 10 (I think), and completely oblivious to the concept of ‘good wine’.  My parents had been keeping a bottle of apparently ’good’ red wine for several years and decided to open it one night for dinner.  It was my duty to set the table that night, and I decided I would have a little fun.  So I mixed the wine they poured for themselves with straight cranberry cocktail juice.  Their faces went a little strange, and then I burst out laughing.  Surprisingly, they were not upset at all.  I don’t know if I can say I would have had as much patience.

Having grown up in the digital age now, though, it is quite obvious that the art of the prank has evolved with the technologies now available .  Ashton Kutcher gave us “Punk’d”, for instance. Howie Mandell’s, erm, less popular “Howie Do It” is another. And the social-networking online explosion has given rise to innumerable ways to embarass your friends with a YouTube video or a Facebook photo.

But these attempts at digital pranks are still a bit…simple.  A bit old-fashioned.

Witness what has to be one of the greatest pranks in recent memory (for me anyway), and one that required some professional-level use of 3D imaging software, web 2.0 technologies, and viral online video. It seems some dyed-in-the-wool car geeks with a bit too much time on their hands were able to dupe the entire automotive journalism world into massively reporting about a new Porsche prototype that, for lack of a better term, was a complete fake.

For the full run down of how the prank was pulled off, check out this Jalopnik.com story.

The short version is this.  With some solid time spent creating some very high quality fake digital images, and then a subsequent couple of months feeding images and videos to the press to build up hype, the pranksters created some wholly impressive stats in just a week’s time: On the Jalopnik.com site alone, the following figures reveal the effectiveness of this high-tech game:

Video views of fake concept: 24,057 views, 52 comments
Screenshot views: 13,626 views, 76 comments
Photo views: 15,076 views, 143 comments

The pranksters get an A for effort, and execution for that matter, in my book.  But their success is also indicative of a larger trend in the media.  Multimedia is the name of the game now.  Regardless of how genuine the content or their intentions were, the prank would simply not have gone anywhere without hiqh quality imagery, viral video and lots of photos.  Digital content formats are now playing a crucial role in creating stories as media outlets’ platforms have become more technology- and medium-diverse.

Earlier this week, TuneUp’s blog went live.  And part of the campaign we’ll be helping them with is to create video and audio content that can be distributed widely and help users take better care of their PCs.

So, a good lesson hidden in a good prank.  Although mostly, it just made for a good laugh!