The Art of Publicity Stunts: A comprehensive how-to guide to PR and marketing stunts

By Publishdrive

A comprehensive guide to PR and marketing stunts, starting from the basics, working our way up to advanced level stunts. PR stunts are wonderful tools to reach media coverage for our company, organisation our cause, with a minimal cost. The Art of Publicity Stunts is a helpful guide for everywone who wishes to reach a general, or a specific target audience on a tight budget. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jul 6, 2019

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The Art of Publicity Stunts

A comprehensive how-to guide to PR and marketing stunts

Andras Gyorfi 

Author: Andras Gyorfi

© Andras Gyorfi 2019

Prologue

Building a company is hard, especially when we don't have tens, let alone hundreds of thousands of dollars capital at our exposure. We have to purchase tools, pay our employees, often we have to obtain permits as well. The difficult part comes when we're ready to enter the market, we have to get the public aware of our existence. We'll need to utilize marketing, this is one of the most important and unavoidable part of every company. Marketing may come with severe costs however, furthermore we have to broadcast our message within constantly increasing competition and noise, to the general public that tends to isolate itself from advertisements more and more. I'm going to introduce you to a field in this book that has been dear to me for a long time now, one that I put into practice several times in the process of building my companies. Publicity stunt is an incredibly exciting tool that can help us reach a lot of people within a short period of time, with minimal cost. I'm going to show you the theory and practical implementation of publicity stunts as well, through my own successes and international examples from others. My goal is to give effective help to entrepreneurs, both beginners and already successful ones too. A publicity stunt is more than just a simple marketing tool: it's a peculiar field, a special mixture of human psychology and the inner workings of the media, a true art. If I can help at least one entrepreneur out there in reaching his or her goals, then my work was worth it, enjoy!

Andras Gyorfi

The essence of publicity stunts

The psychology of news consumption

Traveling around a journalist's mind

Secrets of the successful publicity stunt

The tool of newsjacking

Steps of a publicity stunt

Post-following

Case studies

Publicity stunt in the age of social media

The beneficiaries of publicity stunts

A portfolio of ideas

Publicity stunt collection

The essence of publicity stunts

I was building two projects in parallel in Hungary around 2010, they were similar in that tabloids were an ideal tool for marketing. They were the best possible marketing option for the sake of the projects growth due to the target audience. I made contact with the salespeople of one the leading tabloid website, I wanted to promote the project I expected faster and bigger results from. After a short negotiation we go to an agreement, I had to pay 2000 dollars for only two days worth of advertising, a sum of money that was rather large for me at the time. However, knowing how large traffic the site had, I had no doubt that I made a very expensive, but highly beneficial step that will bring in tons of visitors to my site.

The project was viable, so even if my heart ached for paying that much money, I still relaxed on the night before the advertisement went live, waiting for the morning and the swarms of visitors. The advertisement went live at 6 AM as we agreed on, they made it appear right on time. 

I was sitting in front of the computer at 6 AM of course, waiting for the early birds. It was nice to see that something I made has appeared on a such a prominent place, even if I had to pay for it. I stared intensely at the screen till 7AM, but nothing happened. I figured people did not arrive to work yet, I should give it an hour or more. I haven’t received a single visitor from the advertisement, not at 9AM, nor at 10AM either. I wasn't worried, I assumed people who find this advertisement interesting would sit down to the computer a little bit later, maybe around noon. Of course, I was fooling myself. It was clear by that point that there's a problem, a big one. With the first day over and me being disappointed and sad, I went to sleep. The second day has passed without results too, I had to face the harsh reality, so I went over the raw numbers. I had exactly twelve visitors in the course of two days, none of them signed up to my site. I used up a significant portion of my funds without seeing any result whatsoever. It took days till I got a hold of myself and could look both at my company and the world in a positive way again. It worked out in the end of course. The site reached huge successes after this, I continued to work on it for years. 

Not longer after this incident, the other project needed marketing as well, having learned my lessons, I decided there's no way I'm going to buy any advertising space on tabloid websites or else. Not to mention, my funds were running short as well. So I had an idea, I simply searched for the contact info of a few large tabloids, I wrote an e-mail to every one of them.

I briefly introduced the site, explaining its’ essence, what our goals are, to whom this service is aimed at. My goal of course was to have them pay attention to my site in any shape or form, but I didn't had much faith in anyone writing an article about it. A few months later, when I routinely checked the site's traffic counter, I saw that over twelve thousand people have visited under the course of a single day, gaining two thousand new sign-ups as well. I was completely shocked, but that shock soon turned into happiness. It was an absolutely huge success for me, but I simply couldn't understand how it happend. After some investigation, I soon found out that the tabloid magazine where I previously advertised my other site has written an article about this project, as a result of the letter I sent them earlier. They published this article as a traditional editorial content among other articles, putting in a link too pointing to my site. This didn't cost me a single penny, yet the end result was staggering. 

The lesson? The lesson is that traditional, paid advertisements on the Internet, and in the media in general are completely ineffective, we'll see why. Contrary to this, a so-called organic content that journalists publish among all the other daily news will reach a lot more people.

I didn't even realize that what I'm doing is actually a publicity stunt. I researched the field after being motivated by the success: I understood and learned it, then made use of it countless times in building various companies. My first success required my project to be new and unusual in domestic terms, this doesn't mean however we can't be present in the media with virtually any kind of company.

Definition

Publicity stunt refers either to the conscious, planned act, or to the creation of written, audio, video material that we use in order to have the media talk about it and present it in a way our company, product, service or organization will receive attention from it as well, directly or indirectly. 

Publicity stunt isn't an exact, precisely describable term, rather a collective labeling of basically anything we want to appear in the media with, without the purchase of advertising spaces or PR materials. Publicity stunt is a broad term similarly to the term media, however the point is always to do something -be it writing an article, making a video, even placing an object in public space, or anything else-, with which we have the conscious goal of it generating media appearances for us. 

We may think that the tool of publicity stunts is an element of modern marketing, but it is something that has been used by entrepreneurs for centuries, or rather by those who want to deliver something to people. We'll see examples of publicity stunts from a hundred years ago as well in the chapter Case studies. 

It's important not to confuse the field of publicity stunt with an other, conceptually similar marketing tool called growth hacking. The point of growth hacking is to hack the tools necessary for our growth, like social media for example. The similarity between the two fields still holds true of course, yet the differences between the two are well-defined. Publicity stunt is explicitly about reaching media appearances, whereas growth hacking is a more complex method and approach based on both learning the way the tools necessary for our growth work, and putting that knowledge into use. The common thread between the two is hacking something, or in other words, to learn how something works, and to act in a way that makes that particular something work in our favor, once we thoroughly understand how it functions. Growth hacking is a more technocratic and technology intensive field that demands the thorough understanding of how the various tools work, whereas publicity stunt is based on human psychology and the way the media functions. 

Most of the beginner or long established SMEs don't have the opportunity to be present in market leading online spaces, the tool of publicity stunts can potentially solve this problem. It creates the possibility to reach even several million Dollars' worth of media appearances for virtually everyone, for practically free. We'll see that even though the tool of publicity stunts are mostly important to companies with a