Pull a stunt

Publicity stunts are a way for a brand to make waves, make a splash or blow the competition out of the water. Where am I going with these aqueous metaphors?

To Maldives, of course. At less than five feet above sea level, this archipelago is the lowest lying country on Earth. And, therefore, the country most at risk from climate change.

Prime Minister Nasheed of Maldives recently held an underwater summit with his cabinet to publicise the fact that his island nation could soon disappear due to rising sea levels. Donning scuba gear Nasheed and his ministers-turned-frogmen sat at undersea desks and communicated with white boards and hand gestures while fish swam about.

The watery cabinet signed a declaration – calling for a cut in carbon emissions around the world – to be presented at the upcoming UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

What happens if the initiative fails? Nasheed puts it succinctly: We are all going to die.

This event got covered by all major international news networks and got its message across more effectively than any regular communication could ever have.

Publicity stunts are not new. In fact, they form a rather grand tradition that includes such famous events as the Olympic Torch Relay, which has been held before every Olympic event since 1936, generating mega-publicity for the games, the athletes and the sponsors.

Going back much further in history, there was the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, American patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded a ship and tossed more than 300 chests of tea into the harbour to protest the monopoly of the East India Company and repressive taxation.

Over two centuries later, every secondary school student still studies this textbook example of an effective publicity stunt.

In the 1920s, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, worked for the American Tobacco Company. He sent a group of female models to march in the New York City parade. He told the media that these models were a group of women’s rights activists who would be lighting torches of freedom. When the paparazzi were ready with their cameras what the women did was light up Lucky Strikes cigarettes, leading to the New York Times headline “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’”.

More recently, in 1999, there have been the Calendar Girls. A group of elderly women from the Women’s Institute in Yorkshire, UK, posed nude – though partly obscured by strategically placed potted plants or baked goods – for a calendar which sold 800,000 copies. This stunt inspired a hit movie starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters and helped raise two million pounds for leukaemia research.

As you can see, the underwater summit was just the most recent example from a long line of colourful and memorable publicity stunts.

If you want your brand to go down in history, I recommend pulling a stunt. But if you want it to work, don’t be shy, go the whole hog, make it big. Your ambition must be to make front page news.

(The author is Executive Creative Director, South Asia of Ogilvy & Mather)