9
A job
The best island in the world had an application form, and 34,000 people filled it in.
34,000+Applications for Tourism Queensland's "Best Job in the World".
In 2009 Tourism Queensland advertised a six-month contract as caretaker of Hamilton Island: free accommodation, about A$150,000, and a job description consisting mostly of swimming and blogging about it.
It was a promotion wearing a job advert's clothes, and it worked spectacularly, tens of thousands of video applications, coverage in every market Queensland wanted tourists from, and an estimated media value orders of magnitude above what it cost.
Ben Southall won it. He was stung by an Irukandji jellyfish near the end of the contract, which is the most Australian possible epilogue.
It also spawned imitators for a decade, most of which missed the point. What made it work was that the job was genuinely doable and genuinely enviable; the ones that failed were transparently stunts, and audiences spotted the difference immediately.