When demolition crews at the former Dayton's department store in Minneapolis discovered a decades-old mummified primate in the vents, my team saw a marketing opportunity.

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The bizarre discovery had made it to the national news circuit, where all manner of audience offered theories as to how it got there. Some locals (including both a former Mayor and current Governor) claimed that a parent or other relative had stolen a monkey from an exotic pet display back in the '60s and released it back into the massive department store, where it likely got lost and ultimately met its demise in a vent.

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To take advantage of the attention, my team developed our own theory: that this unfortunate soul was part of a community of super-smart primates that had once lived in the walls of Dayton's, realizing its potential for office space decades before our real estate developer clients ever did. We "discovered" more objects to help tell our story—desks built from trinkets found around the department store, blueprints for office enhancements, even "anthropological sketches" of what office life must have been like for them. 

The micro-campaign was a huge hit among the brokerage community to whom we were marketing. In retrospect, we may have even gone a little overboard, but damn if it wasn't fun.