2020 has been pretty weird so far hasn’t it, news-wise? We’ve had Megxit, the murmurings of World War 3 and Jeff Bezos’ phone allegedly being hacked by the Saudi prince. The same can be said about some of the most head-turning creative brand PR in the past week.
I don’t think ANYONE could have guessed Gwyneth Paltrow’s elite well-being brand Goop selling a candle that supposedly smells like her vagina. The candle’s test run sold out quickly thanks to the endless PR coverage it received – half of me not sure why you’d want to own one but half of me wanting a sniff myself.
Likewise, to celebrate a year anniversary of the infamous Fyre Festival documentary airing on Netflix, Evian announced the face of its new campaign, Andy King, with the tagline ‘So Good You’d Do Anything For It’. Andy famously worked for disgraced entrepreneur Billy McFarland on the festival that ended up being a huge disaster – and during desperate times of the event planning, Billy couldn’t afford to cover a huge Evian water delivery – so convinced Andy to take part in some negotiation fellatio (negollatio?) at customs to try and get hold of it. Luckily Andy managed to get hold of it without having to sell himself completely…
Fyre Festival’s Andy King is finally getting a long overdue cheque from Evian… https://t.co/wkKhEXwFYV
— Metro Entertainment (@Metro_Ents) January 17, 2020
What can be said for these kinds of creative brand PR campaigns is that they really have managed to cut through all of the other noise they’re competing with – something that is so important today.
At Radioactive PR, a big part of what we do is creative – where we come up with proactive, attention-grabbing campaigns to get our clients (and potential clients) featured in top ranking media and exposure to their audiences.
So how can you come up with creative brand PR ideas that have the chance to cut through (and hopefully on the vagina candle / blow job water scale)? Here are some questions we tend to ask ourselves that help with our thinking when coming up with creative at our agency.
- Will it resonate with the target audience? With any idea, it will need to relate to a specific group of people in the sense it’s something they come up against in their lives or it’s linked to something they’re interested in (e.g. pop culture). This is why the Evian campaign has cut through – so many people watched the Fyre Festival documentary! If it resonates, an idea has a better chance of people sitting up and taking notice of it.
- Will it get people talking? If you can imagine people debating the topic or generally talking about it (really, a vagina-scented candle?) then your idea is going to have a stronger chance of getting the exposure. After all that’s the aim of the game!
- Does it have a grain of truth? If the creative has a grain of truth (or, preferably, some science) behind it, it gives it a little more substance. An example of this is when we did our ‘Beard Stroking’ campaign, where we set up a booth for shoppers to stroke beards and reduce their stress levels (in the same way to how stroking a pet can reduce cortisol, the stress hormone).
- Is the idea as fresh and unique as you can make it? There’s the old adage that there’s no such thing as a new idea, which is true. Though when coming up with creative ideas, they should be as fresh and unique as you possibly can make them. A fresh idea (in some form) has a better chance of making an impact! Though, in some instances you could always re-run a creative brand PR campaign that’s been successful in the past – kind of like our ‘Instagram Rich List’ for Hopper HQ, which we’ve rolled out for 2017, 2018 and 2019!
If you’d like to understand what creative brand PR we might do for you, then please drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!