Finnish rapper Petri Laurila started out as "NuEra", offering incisive social critique about societal problems. Critics loved him, sales were dismal.
As a joke, he then released as album that was as crass and low brow as possible, rapping about getting drunk and having sex, with hilariously bad lyrics ("don't be so apathic [sic]/my mind is automatic/the first time I ate pussy it tasted tomatic"). It was a runaway success and he's been milking the cow ever since.
I recall Lester Bangs (the character, but based on the real music critic of the same name) in Almost Famous complaining that rock was being ruined by seriousness, and claiming that rock music was at its best and purest when it was (paraphrasing, I think) "gloriously stupid".
Must admit, I like very-clever rap and intensely-stupid rap and not much in between, myself, and do probably find the latter more broadly appealing, in that it's less likely for such an album to completely miss for me.
The pull quote on the cover, "Gadzooks,' quoth I, 'but here's a saucy bawd!", is itself a funny poke at a cliché in historical writing known as gadzookery.
They thought they had a good idea with the fake campaign but actually had a genius idea with the world conquering lemonade. You can get it in Vienna at many places. I will surely tell this trivia to a lot of people.
Gotta say I love these random Wikipedia articles that pop up. They're always something I didn't exactly need to know, but verge enough on the absurd that I just have to read.
Despite it being a big joke, I wonder what contemporary reviews of the book actually were, and how many copies ended up selling?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Valley_of_the_Dolls