Category Archives: Bad ideas

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.

Related Reading:
Tip #206: Sound it out

Let your words tell your story. That’s what they’re for. Using multiple emphasis styles in your writing is not clever, and it looks like spam…

Rafe, Remember [[a company I don’t remember]] whom you wrote about for CNET? Thanks by the way – you’re on our Buzz Page:

The social enterprise “workhorse” for business, offering more than social chit-chat – is changing the process and pace of work of 5,000 largely deadline-driven companies, getting products to market, meeting news deadlines and delivering campaigns – fast. One customer summed it up, “I’ll never again work in a company that only relies on email.”

Fast Adoption & Sustained Usage Bypasses E-Mail
A customer’s employee user adoption spiked to more than 75% of the office after just 20 days of deployment; employees consistently collaborate with between 500 to over 1,000 daily posts during the typical work week.

Mobile adoption is already outpacing desktop usage, making it critical for the mobile app to work as hard and as well as the desktop. On April 24, [[Company]] will launch a new mobile app (40% faster) with all of the robust capabilities for work on the go. New, industry-leading advisors formerly at YouSendIt, TechCrunch and Yammer have joined the team and also will be announced.

Please let me know if you are interested in a briefing and/or reporting on this story …

 

In the example above, fully 67% of the words are emphasized with bold, italic, or underlining. It’s counter-productive. As any designer will tell you, when everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

Just because you take yourself seriously, it doesn’t mean I have to.

This tip is for everyone who’s pitching me to cover their smartphone case or revolutionary screen cleaning product at CES next week. You’ve been warned.

Hat tip: Paul Sloan

If the pitch makes you want to wash yourself after writing it, don’t send it.

Continue reading →

Just got this doubleplusgood announcement from Apple regarding the company’s press conference tomorrow (September 1):

Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at www.apple.com.

Emphasis mine. Yep, that’s “open” in Apple’s world: It only applies to Apple hardware. Even Safari on a Windows computer doesn’t qualify.

As a PR stunt, it is brilliant. If nothing else it’ll give people a reason to run Safari on their Macs tomorrow. (I haven’t used the app myself in months.)  And it’s a great demo for HTML 5.

But as worded, it reads Orwellian. This is shaping up to be a great case study in how companies lose the trust of the people who cover them. You get a free pass on a certain amount of doublespeak. Apple’s running way beyond that. It’s not an example worth emulating.

(By the way, I’ll be covering the Apple announcement on CNET Live, starting at 9:45 a.m. Pacific time.)

At least it has a hair net on it already.

If you’re going to send marketing swag, it would be good to send something that doesn’t make the receiver recoil in horror and fling the swag across the room in disgust.

I refer to the mullet wig I recently got from a type foundry. Before I remembered that the company had previously sent me an empty Styrofoam head form to put the wig on, I honestly thought it was a furry creature that had expired in transit.

See also: Tip #54: Protection

As a friendly reminder, I point my readers towards Pro PR Tip #13, Don’t drink and brand. Today’s Bad Company Name award goes to… well, I’ll let you read the email.

Goober Networks, a leading Unified Communications (UC) solution provider, plans to announce the next version of its UC solution on Tuesday, May 11…

Seriously, people. You’re not make making novelty candy products here. Grow up.

Yes, Mr. startup CEO, your girlfriend is hot. But try to keep your hands off her when you’re pitching me at a conference reception.