Top 5 Creative Publicity Stunts in 2011

by John Kremer on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 | No Comments

Guest Post by Frank Anderson

Creative publicity stunts are largely, by their very nature, one-off events which cannot be repeated. That’s because the whole raison d’être of a publicity stunt is to shock people and make such a splash that you’ll inevitably read about in the paper.

One of the most famous publicity stunts of all time was of course the War of the Worlds broadcast which was designed to sound like an actual news report. At the time, people really believed that the earth was being invaded by Martians. While the top five creative publicity stunts of 2011 weren’t quite as earth shattering (no pun intended) as all that, these were some pretty big deals.

News of the World Scandal

Call it a publicity stunt, call it journalism gone haywire – the most creative and spectacular publicity stunt of 2011 would have to be the News of World wiretapping report. In this case, News of the World reporters deliberately wiretapped hundreds of people, ostensibly to show just how easy it was to do.

The result was not however what Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News of the World, might have wanted. Rather than helping him sell more newspapers, this particular publicity stunt cost him millions of pounds sterling when he was forced to shutter one of his premier newspapers.

Murdoch is still trying to shake off the ill effects of this publicity stunt, but it will surely go down in the annals of history as one of the greatest (and stupidest) publicity stunts of all time.

Sonic Firsts

Here’s another wild and wacky creative publicity stunt for 2011 (actually a series of them) which didn’t get quite as much press as the News of the World Scandal but which still generated quite a bit of buzz. Chevrolet introduced the Chevy Sonic 2012 by saying it would be a first.

Chevy Sonic

The idea was to try all kinds of crazy stunts using the Chevy Sonic. For example, they had a Sonic do a 10 story bungee jump (video is on their website) as well as parachute out of a plane. You can see the videos of these stunts and participate in a contest to win a Chevy Sonic at their website at http://www.letsdothis.com.

LAN Pulls an Oprah

Many people remember the Oprah Winfrey Show’s publicity stunt a few years ago where she gave away a free car to every member of the studio audience. Well, LAN airlines, who recently expanded service to South America, thought it was time to try that again. This time, they announced that a special surprise would happen at Nuela, a swanky restaurant in New York City.

They shocked diners with this creative publicity stunt by first having a handful of stewardesses give out prizes to three lucky people and then announcing that the real surprise was that every single diner in the restaurant was getting a prize – a free trip to anywhere LAN flies in South America. The tickets were taped to the bottom of the tables and a mad scramble ensued when diners learned of the free tickets.

Shrek Invasion

This one wasn’t very costly as far as creative publicity stunts go, but it did generate quite a lot of buzz for the Beautiful People website. A dating site that only accepts beautiful people, it requires you to pass a test of beauty by their careful screeners before you can appear on the site (no word on what they do to prevent you from using a fake photo).

Beautiful People

In order to publicize their site, they planted a false rumor that a virus named Shrek (yes, after the troll – get it?) had planted 30,000 profiles of hideous people on the site. This was later proved to be a masterful publicity stunt and the site was able to generate lots of free publicity for the beautiful people they like to attract.

The Donald Will Take Gold Please

Finally, Donald Trump turned a few heads when he ran a publicity stunt which involved gold – a whole lot of the stuff. As a way of trying to boost his popularity during his brief flirtation with running for president, the Donald decided to show how the dollar has become worthless by accepting a security deposit in the form of three gold bars worth more than $176,000 for an apartment in his exclusive New York City tower. As creative publicity stunts go, it was fairly mild, but still clever for someone trying to highlight his concern about fiscal irresponsibility.

– Frank Anderson is a publicity and social media blogger. He is also involved with a handful of exchange hosting projects that he finds important for the future of the Internet.

We Don’t Believe You, You Need More People: The Biggest Publicity Stunt Faux-Relationships Of All Time (bossip.com)

The Daily Grind: Do you think leaks are publicity stunts? (massively.joystiq.com)

Kim Kardashian Wedding A Publicity Stunt? Tell Us Something We Don’t Know (lezgetreal.com)

CSR – examples of corporations doing brave and awesome things (coretocore.wordpress.com)

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