I love PR stunts. Especially when they go wrong. It’s like… justice.
What’s a PR stunt? It’s an event or made-up news item that’s about itself, not a product and not a company. Sometimes PR stunts can go incredibly well, especially when they’re attached to a well-loved brand. If they are awesome unto themselves, they can actually make the brand stronger. I’m looking at you, Red Bull Flugtag.
Or sometimes they can go horribly wrong. Like today’s study in PR stunt flops: Skittles. To go along with the candy’s new Skittle Cloud ad campaign, Wrigley (which makes Skittles), created a remote-controlled Skittles Cloud robot and thought they’d trot it out to reporters to reinforce the ads.
My team in New York loves Skittles. They accepted the request to host the Skittles robot, and thought they’d get a nice, harmless, feel-good story about a magical robot that feeds them candy.
But what arrived in our New York office was a remote-controlled robot that, in everyone’s opinion, pooped Skittles.
During the robot demo, the PR rep must have known things were going amiss. After the meeting, but before our story ran, our writer got an email from the PR rep pleading,
Could you leave out any mention of pooping Skittles?
I had to make the call on this one. And I had to come down on the side of accuracy. Which is to say, the robot that visited looked like it pooped Skittles. That was its strongest impression, so that’s what went in the headline. To say anything else would have been inaccurate and a capitulation to PR. We were expecting to have fun with the Skittles bot, not make fun of it, but ultimately, how could we not?
Read the story here: Skittles Made a Candy-Pooping Robot, and It Visited Our Office.
USA Today had a similar take: A candy-filled cloud? Skittles unveils new ad campaign
That’s the way it goes. If yout stunt crashes, that will be the story, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.
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Tip #206: Sound it out
Rafe
Pro PR Tips 
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This is so sad. I saw very successful stunt earlier today. and this one is really an embarrassing case. Why they don’t see the robot first and then give it a revealing event?