Here's a thing that we did a few years ago called the Wealth Calculator. We were briefed (by the PR team) to come up with something that would generate stories around their 'financial comparison tools'.

Financial comparison tools are obviously inherently fascinating so the brief was easy ;-)

We scratched our heads for a bit then came up with the idea that, if we assume that money makes you happy, just how much money would it take?

We figured that people would be interested in the cost of happiness and could almost smell the headlines. The Yahoo! guys liked it too. So we built a funny, quickfire quiz that felt like fun to go through. Then we asked a couple of lifestyle questions. From that we could figure out your total cost of happiness, plus how long it'd take you to 'get happy'. Then of course we suggested that you might get there a little quicker if you sorted out your finances with the help of Yahoo's comparison tools.

In case you're interested the average cost of happiness in the UK is £2.3m (or at least it was in 2004).

The idea and the website generated lots of press, radio and online coverage - the site itself generated the 'data' for the story.

The site's looking a bit tired now, but it still works. Have a play...