Easter Eggs

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved easter eggs. I’ve never been a huge fan of chocolate; what I enjoyed was the searching and finding – the excitement that came from knowing I’d looked in the right place and found something special.

Over the years, it’s become obvious that easter eggs are everywhere. From DVD menus that hide extra content only accessible by going left when you should go right or up when you should go down, to video games that hide odes and homages to older games.

One of the best easter eggs I’ve ever found (and really want to share) was the flight simulator in Excel ‘97. To access it, all you had to do was:

• 1. Press F5 in a new Worksheet
• 2. Type X97:L97 and hit “Enter”
• 3. Press the “Tab” key
• 4. Hold “Ctrl” + “”Shift”
• 5. Click on the Chart Wizard toolbar button

And it worked. It was amazing – using your arrow keys, you could fly around an infinite space when you should be inputting formulas and calculating costs.

Today, easter eggs are everywhere and awareness is ramping up quickly. It didn’t take long before almost everyone knew to type “do a barrel roll” or “let it snow” in Google. YouTube included their own “snow fun” with a button that would float interactive flakes over many videos. I’m not sure if it’s an easter egg, per se, but YouTube also enables numeric navigation through their videos, so hitting “0” will take you to the beginning of the video, “5” to the middle and “9” to the end, with numbers in between further splitting up the video. I’ve long thought this presented an opportunity to hide messages in videos by telling watchers to hit sequences of numbers to reveal a secret sentence.

What I want to know is: How could we use easter eggs in advertising? Google and YouTube have the advantage of being sites that millions of people visit every day. Similarly, films and videogames are watched and played by passionate and fastidious fans who love searching every frame and pixel for hidden goodies. Since an easter egg is only exciting when it’s found, how can we bring that experience of discovery to the masses – and, here’s the kicker, offer a pay-off in return that is actually valuable to the user?

The goal of easter eggs is to provide that “surprise and delight” for those members of your audience that are cunning or committed enough to find them. They promote and reward extended interaction with your site or brand and reward curiousity with excitement. Just like the chocolate eggs hidden when I was young – I’ll never be sad when I find an easter egg.