‘Stuntwatch’

The Media Guardian published an article of mine in yesterday’s Media comment looking at the rise of Google’s SideWiki and what it will mean for the future of PR. To read the published version, click here. For the unexpurgated version, please keep reading!

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Given the amount of fear other Google innovations, like their library project, have caused, it’s surprising that alarms bells have not been heard ringing throughout the PR world since SideWiki’s launch in September. The internet is an evolutionary tool and for the world of PR, its daily use is as significant as the use of the wheel for stone age man. Except revolution has taken the place of evolution as the net brings about change at an astonishing rate.

Few people in PR, it seems, have considered the way that SideWiki will change the lives of beleaguered PR folk. I believe that, in time, this tool will significantly change the way brands strategize, think and exist. SideWiki is going to challenge PR by providing the masses with the tool for the ultimate expression of people power, something uncontainable that will need constant monitoring.

As the name suggests, this is a tool that allows anyone who wants to (and who has the right browser – Firefox or IE) to comment on anything on the web and have that comment displayed in a pop out window alongside for all to see. All they have to do is download the Google toolbar and they’re ready to go. SideWiki will change the way that everything is perceived, especially once it reaches more browsers.

A lot of the PR industry, however, is living like an ostrich with mange; only just summoning up the energy to bury its collective head in the sand. Too many PR folk are too busy pitching half-arsed ideas to see the real threat. The clear and present danger for sluggish PRs is the way that the net continues to develop and construct devices that enable individuals to increase their power. These devices shift as quickly as riptides and, at the moment, it seems that the only people that can survive them are the consumers they cater for.

SideWiki will make it impossible to promote one message and not be held to account. Organisations that have traditionally engaged only in one way conversations or broadcast models will struggle to survive in a SideWiki world. Angry at the latest government wrongdoing? Why not post your grievances next the department where everyone can see them? Find out the ethical practices of confectionary giant aren’t quite as ethical as its advertising suggests? SideWiki is there to help and any PR firm that fails to provide acceptable answers will be open to further public assault by irate consumers.

Brand integrity has to be at the core of brand thinking if the brands are to survive this transparency. Companies will be compelled to consider taking a real position and relate to a set of ideas the marketplace cares about – SideWiki will surely force their hand into a position of fundamental and overwhelming transparency. For fashionable PR execs this transparency will either be terrifying or inspiring. I hope that, thanks to SideWiki, we will see the death of the myopic PR clone and evolve to a position where serious strategic thinkers in PR will challenge the other marketing dinosaurs.

The recession has herded agencies into a pit; they have been humbled in particular by ad agencies who are moving in on proven PR processes, eager to keep making money but who aren’t necessarily experts in that field. The American company Crispin Porter & Bogusky declared in a recent Campaign article that they had asked the agency to stop writing ad script and start writing PR releases instead. Very 1980s. Also in the mix are highly creative and respected agencies like Fallon and Mother, who are taking a firm hand in the PR aspects of campaigns.

PR companies must offer and embrace sophisticated monitoring and tracking devices to keep their clients up to speed, offer solutions and encourage brand bravery and transparency. If they don’t, they will die.

Predictable PR is on the red list of endangered species. The evolution of SideWiki is a seminal moment, when the industry’s destiny is in its own hands. Development forces contributing to the evolution of the web are threatening PR’s demise. PR budgets on the whole bring about reactive, crisis thinking, based on negative responses that threaten their clients’ spot in the market.

The Innocent brand signaled the way forward back in 1997. Lacking bags of readies to spend on traditional marketing, they chose instead to launch a multitude of catalyst conversations around their packaging and experiential events. They were a word of mouth success well before the full web revolution and have paved the way for many more campaigns using the new technology.

Applying the ancient conventions and old codes of conduct of communications to the new world of parallel influence will only accelerate the inconsequence of traditional marketers. The Social Media world encloses our personal and professional actions – the only answer for PR folk is to take a more active role in being brand custodians, representing a higher degree of brands and reputation management.

Ad agencies once proactively shaped vision but now PR is demonstrably just as capable at understanding and cultivating future thinking, if not more so. PR has always engaged in a two-way conversation and should be capitalising on this to earn their clients’ trust. SideWiki is a call to arms – there is no excuse for complacency, as failure in today’s landscape is public, searchable, and enduring.

If you want proof that stunts are an art form, your best bet is to head down to the Tate Modern’s Pop exhibition and take a long, hard look at the Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons exhibits. Here are two prime examples of early stops at one of the stations of the cross of Consumerism, part of its steady progress to becoming the prime 21st Century religion.

And proof is needed that stunts are an art form – they are making something of a comeback at the moment, but the latest examples – the Starsuckers film and Balloon Boy – are in need of a bit of spit and polish if they are to really shine. Despite all this, there has been not one mention of the master of the hoax, Joey Skaggs, the master Culture Jammer whose hoaxes have always had a pertinent point to make. This is a pity because the Starsuckers team could learn a trick or two from him.

Take, for example, Skaggs’s Celebrity Sperm Bank hoax from 1976. Skaggs organised a sperm bank auction in New York, then arranged for the sperm bank to be robbed with the semen supposedly being taken hostage. Or the Dog Meat Soup hoax from 1994, in which Skaggs portrayed Kim Yung Soo, a butcher who wanted to purchase dogs for food, to expose cultural intolerance and the media’s tendency to overreact. These are the stunts of a master and they are works of art.

There has been considerable attention for the hoaxes at the heart of the new film Starsuckers – the film’s makers created a series of hoax stories about celebrities that they then pushed on the tabloids. The aim was to point out how easily one could dupe journalists at the tabloids into taking patently ridiculous stories about celebrities and in this they succeeded. Reports of Amy Winehouse’s beehive catching fire, Avril Lavigne falling asleep in a nightclub and Russell Brand’s secret childhood desire to be a banker all made the tabloids – and some made it round the world.

But filmmakers’ aim, which was to expose how the whole of the news industry is running stories without checking their facts, has not been achieved. This was not a sublime act of Culture Jamming – celebrity journalism and hard news are quite different animals (most of the time at least) and the hoax story they tried to push on the media that came closest to qualifying as real news, in which G20 protestors were apparently planning to dump tonnes of sugar on Alan Sugar’s drive, was not picked up.

Telling everybody that it’s easy to pass off nonsense about celebrities to the papers is hardly news in itself – most reporting of the lives of celebrities verges on the nonsensical as it is and most people know this and don’t care, so far gone is their addiction to celebrity soap. The team behind Starsuckers are going to have to work harder if they are to achieve what they want.

Balloon Boy is another matter again. A family in Colorado claimed that they thought their son had been carried off by a weather balloon – he was found “hiding” in the attic after an expensive two hour cross country chase in full view of the world’s media. I suspect that this was a stunt by a publicity-hungry family of stormchasers keen to further promote themselves after appearing on American Wife Swap. I also suspect that the only reason that the police aren’t treating this as a hoax is to save face.

None of this has stopped a full-scale media hoo-ha and #balloon boy trending on Twitter. There’s been reams of analysis in the medi and newscasters claiming they’d burst into tears as a result, followed by a backlash after the six year old boy was found in the attic at home. As my pal Mark Solomons says: “He’s a falcon liar, that’s what he is. The father put the con in Falcon. It’s like the Bart-Simpson-down-the-well episode. If the balloon had been up any longer, they could have had Sting do a charity record.”

We know that the media are willing consumers of all kinds of storytelling, but it would be good to see more artfulness and careful thought going into any future hoaxes. More Skaggs less blags, perhaps?

What is Nicolas Sarkozy’s problem with his height? He can’t seem to go a week without turning up in the press reportedly wearing a pair of stacked heels and standing on tiptoe in an effort to make himself feel taller – be it next to Barack Obama or factory workers in Normandy.

His latest stunt, being widely reported on in the press at the moment, is the photo opportunity he took at a Normandy factory last Thursday, in which the workers he was photographed with were all shorter than he was.

Sarkozy stands at either 5’5” or 5’6”, depending on which journal you read – it’s abundantly clear that he is constantly kept on his toes trying to obfuscate on the issue of his height – but this latest venture, where volunteers shorter than the French president were called for to stand behind him as he made a speech, takes his problems with the state of his limited verticality to new heights. He seems to be developing a Napoleon complex. This is not an attractive trait in the French president, as history has shown.

The fact that the Élysée Palace spinmeisters haven’t taken the issue in hand, and instead seem to be actively falling in step with Sarkozy’s wishes, only adds to the Napoleonic complexity of the matter. They need to do something if they want to stop him becoming a laughing stock. One simply cannot be a global leader and not be able to deal with one’s height – or lack of it – in the 21st century.

It’s a PR disaster to be seen as so self-obsessed when there are much bigger issues in the world that need much more urgent attention. Sarkozy needs to get over his personal issues, throw out his Cuban heels, realise that he has an attractive trophy wife and that some people envy him for that (this seems to be the sort of recognition he’s craving) and, most of all, recognise that the whole world is watching – and laughing at – his methods of projecting himself.

This footage is from the original Belgian report that broke the news that Sarkozy was actively seeking people his height or shorter to stand behind him on the podium…

Could the tabloid-friendly sight of Cristiano Ronaldo and Paris Hilton in a Los Angeles nightclub the night before the footballer’s Real Madrid deal was confirmed be a coincidence? Originally published on the Guardian website

Call me a cynical old publicist but I have to admit that I am hardly surprised to see Cristiano Ronaldo spread across the tabloids today with Paris Hilton tucked under his arm at a club in Los Angeles.

It’s a marriage made in franchise heaven - the world’s most expensive footballer and the headline-grabbing socialite together on the eve of Ronaldo’s ascension to the giddy heights of football godhood – and an act of sublime stuntsmanship. It cannot be a coincidence.

Bear in mind that Real Madrid is almost certainly banking on being able to get more than a bit of loose change back from Ronaldo’s £80m price tag – not to mention his mooted wages of £200,000 per week – on the back of selling shirts, and it makes perfect sense that Ronaldo is to be found in an American nightclub… the night before the deal is announced.

They want to hook the American Latino market, which is where the US’s huge soccer audience is to be found. They need Ronaldo to follow in the golden boots of David Beckham. What better way than to place him at the jugular of America’s uber-celebrity, Paris Hilton?

Rumour has it that the deal was put in place a year ago - Real Madrid have had time, then, to plan an assault on the media to hurtle their player into the celebrity stratosphere. Ronaldo’s nightclub dalliance is simply the first step on the road to turning him into the biggest brand in the world of soccer. Already today, by playing the Paris card, he’s knocked Becks off the tabloid front pages in his latest photoshoot in his grundies.

All the ingredients have been carefully crafted and placed in the Petri dish of fame. Over the coming weeks we are going to see a new mutant ogre celebrity emerge from the stew that’s been cooked up.

Football is less and less a game of two halves – it is becoming more like a 3D chess set. On the lowest level is the game itself. Above that are the great players and their wives and girlfriends. But on the topmost level are the superstar money-spinners like Beckham, who hardly even need to play football anymore to earn everyone a living – and now Cristiano Ronaldo is clawing his way up there too.

It’s game on for the press. The planning phase is over and the celebrity games have begun. You can forget the likes of SuBo and the reality freakshow turns – Cristiano Ronaldo is where the uber money’s at. This is the million dollar deal.

My first Guardian piece thanks to followers on Twitter.  People have genuinely and generously given me their thoughts on the worst rebranding they could think of which enabled me to write this piece.  Thank you all of you. Ahh the power of Twitter.

Consignia? Monday? Choco Krispies? All failed rebrands – but Sainsbury’s renaming pollack as Colin should fare better.

God bless Sainsbury’s, whose environmental passion has created a feeding frenzy on the rebranding of pollack – which will now be known as Colin (pronounced co-lan), the French name for a related breed of fish.

This well-timed story proved tempting bait for the country’s news editors and proves that in this downturn, the media are searching for makeover stories. But is this rebranding to go the way of Consignia, Monday and Choco Krispies?

Interestingly, Sainsbury’s has introduced limited edition packaging, designed by Wayne Hemingway, to help ease the transition from pollack to Colin.

A word of warning from history should perhaps be thrown in here about rebranding failures. In my book The Fame Formula, I mention Theodosa Goodman, actress of limited ability, who was renamed Theda Bara (an anagram of Arab Death) in an attempt to turn her into the movie business’s first exotic sex symbol. But the iconographic publicity campaign didn’t turn the milliner’s daughter from Ohio into a global icon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/apr/06/pollack-colin-rebrand-consignia

Read the rest of this entry »

Reading about the Wellcome Collection’s stunt to promote research into the science of the freak show, featuring contortionist Delia du Sol, in the Evening Standard yesterday, I was reminded how, in the dark days of the recession before the big one, I met an extraordinary contortionist called Hugo Zamoratte.

Zamoratte was an Argentina exile who was able to stuff himself into bottles; he had discovered a natural talent for dislocating his joints after he accidentally dislocated his arm in the Argentinian National Guard. After 20 years of practicing his art in South America, training in yoga and gymnastics all the while, he illegally crawled into the US from Mexico through a tiny sewer outlet.

On his arrival in America, Zamoratte’s extraordinary skill was quickly exploited and showcased by the Ringling Brothers. He became a national sensation in the USA. My client at the time, Gerry Cottle’s Circus, were impressed by his ability to stuff himself inside bottles that held as little as ten litres and booked him for their annual season at Wembley Arena. I was handed the task of generating media interest.

I spent weeks researching the great contortionists and, in the course of my research, I discovered the Art of Enterology. Escapology we all knew about – Houdini escaped from things whilst the great Enterologist squeezed into tiny spaces. The art had died out thanks to the more immediate thrill that escapology presented – both took weeks of preparation, but the escape happened in minutes, whereas the enterologists had to take their time getting into the right shape to enter a bottle. Audiences naturally inclined to the flashier, more immediate art.

I stole the idea of this long-lost practice and applied it to Zamoratte, dragging him through all the media hoops available at the time, from Jonathan Ross’ The Last Resort to the Wogan show, presenting him as the missing link in the art of Enterology. Ross still mentions Zamoratte when I see him – his impact was enormous. He garnered a great deal of attention for the Gerry Cottle Circus and went on to become a true international phenomenon.

And then he vanished, like Mickey Rourke’s wrestler. For all I know he is trapped in a bottle somewhere like a genie, wishing he’d spent more time practising escapology. In the meantime, I was fired up with the art of Enterology and, when Britvic asked me to help them launch their new design of bottle a few years later, I returned to the idea, setting up a series of auditions to find a new enterologist who could fit themselves inside an outsized version of the new Britvic bottle.

There was only one person who could do it; Delia du Sol, who is now working with the Wellcome Trust. She was a brilliant eneterologist – the only one who could enter Britvic’s bottle. She had only one flaw – she could never close the little door in the side of the bottle and would have been left exposed, like the overgrown Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, if one of my team hadn’t been on hand to shut the door behind her.

Wellcome’s stunt has no connection with me, I should point out. They have clearly imitated the stunt, recreated it now that some time has passed – very flattering it is too. I’m of the opinion that my book, Improperganda, inspired them to do so. Secondhand copies of the book have been flying off the shelves in the wake of the release of The Fame Formula. Perhaps it’s time for a reprint of Improperganda?

More to the point, I wonder what other stunts of mine that appear in the book will be imitated in the coming months as companies find that they need more interesting ways of communicating their brands and celebrities over the fog of the credit crunch.

Is there any need to reinvent the dating agency? It seems that there is in America, where a company have audaciously taken the process to its extreme, as a press release announcing the launch of Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com, “The World’s First Dating Service for the Terminally Ill” proves.

Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com claims to be “designed to cut through the superficiality and embrace issues we think are most meaningful – the desire and need for understanding, compassion, empathy and comfort between human beings” but it also offers to help terminally ill people to find others like them, who don’t mind they’re dying, to have sex with.

Are they trying to court controversy? Certainly, if the puns throughout the press release are anything to go by. The press release urges terminally ill people to “join us… if you are truly dying to connect” and promises to help them “to go out with a ‘bang’”.

The press release is spectacularly brazen, offering “the possibility for individuals to connect with other open, accepting minds who might better understand their unusual circumstances” and to help potential clients to find “a singing partner for your swan song”, as well as selling their ability to hook people up with sexual partners as desperate as themselves.

I’m astonished by the audacity of this release and the project itself. It is bound to cause a storm of controversy – all of which will no doubt make it a huge hit when it is launched on St. Valentine’s Day.

They’re quite extraordinary, these Americans.

Stunt of the week is the Benylin website and ad campaign advising people on how to take sickies and call in sick to work under the tag line ‘Take a Benilyn Day’ – click here to see what advice they offer.

There’s been quite a hoo-ha in the media about the campaign, which is completely tongue in cheek; the obviousness of this makes the CBI guy’s outrage (in the BBC News footage you can see by clicking here) hilarious – even Fiona Bruce was sniggering when she was reading it out on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock news.

Great PR.

Can you feel the noise? It’s Christmas and there’s no getting away from it, given the inordinate number of Christmas-themed stunts and stories floating inescapably through the ether at the moment. Stuntwatch dons its noise reduction headphones and returns for another look at what PR stunts, dull or delirious, are tickling the media this week. 

The Danish trivia board game BezzerWizzer is trying to bring home the bacon in Britain by announcing the results of a poll looking for ‘the nation’s biggest know it all’. Simon Cowell has been voted into the top spot, according to the Daily Record, beating off Chris Moyles and Jeremy Clarkson. 

Ripley’s Believe it or Not have been getting in on the Christmas action with a tried and tested streak of controversy – they have brought in a post-watershed version of Santa’s grotto and are inviting adults to sit on the knee of a sexy Santa. They are hoping to stir up a fuss similar to the storm in a teacup over Madame Tussaud’s nativity scene a few years ago, featuring waxen effigies of the Beckhams as Mary and Joseph, or Ray Franklin of Frome, who showed soft porn films to adults in Frome, attended by attractive young women dressed as elves, whilst their kids watched Disney films, a move which brought down the wrath of Disney on him.

Perhaps the nicest of this week’s crop is the panto hopeful, rejected at audition 30 times in six years, who has become the Royal Mail’s panto Wicked Queen for their Christmas stamps and who claims to have only discovered this when she went into the Post Office. Quite what the Victorian inventors of the stamp would have made of this rampant commercialism is open to question, but it’s a neat and pleasant story.

The strangest is certainly the story of Cindy the poodle, whose owner Sandra Harkness – a regular on the competitive grooming circuit – has been receiving much coverage for her innovative use of food dye and chalks to transform the poodle into anything from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle to a camel. Proof, if ever there was proof, of the way animals illicit a response is the fact that she has received hate mail for her campaign to get more attention for her pet grooming parlour in California.

There are a number of clever celebrity stunts worth mentioning; top of the list being the announcement that Colleen Rooney has designed a range of jewellery for Argos and the news that Jennifer Aniston will be appearing nude in next month’s GQ, a well-used trope to get a star a little more attention as their career wanes.

On the duller side of the stunt lies Tresemme, who the Telegraph say have conducted a poll to find out men’s favourite hairstyles on their women (apparently long and curly came out on top) and Yakult’s survey that suggests women don’t eat before Christmas parties to make more room for alcohol. I’m not sure how robust Yakult’s statistics are, but it’s a good way of getting headlines, given that it drags in binge drinking and Christmas. Whether it will create much traction for the brand is another matter. Another worthwhile and thrilling survey has found that men and women enjoy using new technology, according to the Daily Star, whilst the Daily Express tells us that scientists have discovered that we get bored because our brains simply disconnect. Quite.

It’s been a fascinating first week of the re-launched Stuntwatch. I first started keeping a weather eye on stunts back in 1997, long before blogging had a name, and have decided to re-launch now because of the sheer volume of PR flack currently hitting the media, from the good to the bad to the downright ugly. And, in the first week of watching alone, there have been a number of worthy news-grabbers, a few charming but failed attempts and one company who failed to make the impact they were hoping for in quite spectacular fashion.

We’ve seen apes on the streets, strange things in ice cream, free singles, charity llamas, missing inflatable bosoms and Christmas stunts galore. But, most pressingly, there has been Dr Pepper and their stunt-gone-bad, which is the only contender in the opening category.

Spectacular failures

Dr Pepper cheekily decided that they would get themselves a little bit of free attention a few months ago by announcing that they would give a free bottle of their syrupy soda drink to everyone in the USA if Guns and Roses brought out their long-awaited album, Chinese Democracy, by the end of 2008. The assumption was that this would be extremely unlikely, given Axl Rose’s long record of procrastination.

It was a great idea for stunt, given that it involved no financial outlay on their part and got people talking about the drink – not one of the most popular brands, being something of an acquired taste – and that, at the time of the stunt’s inception, there was only a slim chance of the album coming out.

The only problem was that the Guns and Roses album came out a few weeks ago, to mediocre reviews, and 365 million people were suddenly entitled to a free bottle of Dr Pepper. The company immediately went on the record saying that that there was a 24 hour window of opportunity in which to claim a free drink coupon from the Dr Pepper website, but demand was so high that the server crashed, leaving many people drink-free and deeply irate, as only thousands of fizzy drink addicts deprived their fix of sugar and caffeine can get. The negative spin immediately went viral, leaving Dr Pepper’s brand image in a sorry state.

More interestingly, Axl Rose has since threatened legal action and Dr Pepper have had their brand paraded in the press unrelentingly, leading to some speculation that Axl Rose’s complaint may be a stunt in itself, with a dual role – to keep the names of both Dr Pepper and Guns and Roses in the papers for as long as possible. Both Dr Pepper and Guns and Roses have been damaged by the release of Chinese Democracy – perhaps this is their way of keeping some traction for both brands. There must be someone, somewhere, hoping that continuous mention of the brand will prove the theory that all publicity is good publicity. It’s possible that the protracted complaints may yield as much brand recognition as either brand could hope for, but the burning question is: are Dr Pepper enjoying the controversy and the gallons of ink expended on the story? I seriously doubt it.

News-grabbers

• Campari, unafraid of recycling the old cliché of the saleability of a drinks product next to a sexy A List celeb, have announced that they are releasing a limited edition calendar featuring Jessica Alba, post-baby and back in trim, in various sultry poses. They will be releasing only 9,999 copies of the calendar and can guarantee a welter of media interest just by limiting the access the public can have to the calendar. As part of a PR campaign that will run over into the New Year, it should do great trade, as people buying the calendar are unlikely to care too much if the stunt is a cliché.
• A quirkily different approach to selling sex is the one taken by Australian men’s mag Ralph, which claims to have lost 130,000 inflatable breasts at sea en route from China – they were supposed to be a free gift for the January issue. Someone would appear to have boobed, but just look closely at the reports – the editor is throwing about quotes about the possibility of Somali pirates stealing them and the Maritime Safety Authority has no knowledge of anything lost at sea. It’s just the sort of cheeky stunt that goes down well as Christmas approaches.
• George Michael has been touting his latest bid for attention and chart dominance by charitably offering a free download of December Song on his website, which will be available as of December 25th. The reason it has received attention is that 1) it’s his first Christmas record since 1984’s Last Christmas and 2) it seems to put paid to reports that he is on the verge of retirement. Cue hyperbole in the press.
• Talking of charitable intentions, some real charities have been in on the action too – Christmas is one of the big push times for the big charities. Most successful, stuntwise, were World Vision, who launched their range of Must Have Gifts – which include mosquito nets for African families and Llamas for Bolivian families, who can sell the wool at market – by parading a llama down Oxford Street. Animals, it seems, still go down well.
• Gap and Mulberry have teamed up once again to raise funds for AIDS charities by releasing a limited edition RED bag in time for Christmas. They have received plenty of attention for this sort of stunt before and now is no exception.
• There’s also the story about Premiere Inns’ charitable intentions towards an eccentric man who has eaten Christmas dinner with them every day of his life but who can no longer afford to continue his fetishistic feeding habit thanks to the credit crunch. Premiere Inns’ PR people, their stunt-meters set to overdrive, have persuaded the company to offer him a free meal for the duration of the credit crunch; they are eating up a fair amount of column inches as a consequence, rolling together Christmas, charity and the recession in one easy to swallow package.
• This week’s overall winner, to my mind, is the promotional stunt for the 40th anniversary DVD release of Planet of the Apes, which saw a number of people dressed in ape suits parading around London and invading the Piccadilly line. It’s a near perfect PR stunt in that it gives good photograph opportunities (especially with London commuters studiously ignoring the simian stuntsters) and allows for a slew of attention-grabbing puns (both the Sun and the Mail went for the ‘tube drives people ape’ option) whilst making sure that the product in question is unavoidably mentioned in press reports, thanks to the carefully recreated film costumes the actors were wearing.

Charming Failures

• The most charming failure was the London restaurant which released a limited edition sprout-flavoured ice cream for Christmas. This would have been a wonderful story and a great way of getting brand coverage, if only the restaurant had named itself! If anyone knows which restaurant it is, perhaps they should let the world know… or at least advise them to get a better PR firm.
• It’s sad to see how many brands give a great story but don’t get a mention – for example, the £1 million Christmas tree that has been floating through the media recently should surely have a name attached to it – but there is no sight of one that I have come across.

 

It’s noticeable that, even looking at a single week, the old clichés still abound – semi-naked ladies next to alcoholic beverages, animals, pop stars and so on jostle for position in the press whilst interesting ideas like the sprout-flavoured ice cream disappear – and that carefully built brand stories take second place to something happening. It’ll be interesting to see what the next week brings.

Please send word of any notable stunts to publicitystunt@borkowski.co.uk