It took me a while to form my opinion on Marc Ecko’s latest stunt. At first I was annoyed but thats just my anti-PR reflex, then I thought it’s fairly meaningless but slowly realize how clever is this guy and that my initial annoyance has to do with (a) my anti-PR reflex, (b) the fact that initially i thought that at the same time he could have been standing with a big bag of 750K cash in $20 notes on a very tall building and decide interactively to which side of the building he will release the cash. But he didn’t - instead he did something far cleverer.
Ecko skillfully created news, a story for people to talk about, a BIG conversation starter in a clearly defined context with clearly defined audience in mind. As Hugh recently put it, “it’s not the object that’s important, it’s the conversations that gravitate around it”. And he did it bloody meticulously.
The only case I can think of that someone received a similar exposure (with ZERO budget) was when this Vincent dude recorded his telephone conversation with AOL…
But then, I cannot help but thinking that he could have done much better things with those 750K. But then (again), that wouldn’t make people talk about you and at the end of the day marketing is not a charitable discipline…
It reminded me how annoyed I was when I followed the bonfire of the brand story of Neil Boorman. Now that was a really stupid thing to do for the sake of publicity. There you have a massive pile of thousands of pounds worth of perfectly good stuff and that prick sets it on fire. wow, you’re so brave, that must be a terrible moment for you. I really wanted to fry his brand-loving ass on that bonfire.
Perhaps it’s time to start a real debate on publicity. The common old wisdom of no publicity is bad publicity and the newer Crispin-Potter’s meme that marketing/advertising is anything that makes a brand famous are too generic, cliche’ and have been prove wrong more than once.
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