Warren Johnson, founder of W Communications, explains why everyone is talking about stunts (again)

Last month saw one of the biggest PR stunts I've seen in a very long time. Tropicana lit up London's Trafalgar Square several hours before sunrise with an artificial sun with the power of 60,000 light bulbs. This sun, created by installation artists Greyworld, had a surface area of 200 square meters and weighed over 2,500 kilos. Its internal light source produced four million lumens of light, which Greyworld claimed would make it visible from space. 

In case you didn't catch a glimpse of what I'm talking about, you can watch a video of the installation below:

Before I go on, I must disclose that this was the work (not solely I might add) of my wife, the creative director at PR firm Freud Communications, and this is not an attempt to promote the campaign further, but this stunt got me thinking. Does this mark a return to the golden era of the stunt, when Concorde went blue, an entire street went pink and Gail Porter’s arse covered the Houses of Parliament?

The stunt had a golden age in the late 1990s when brands seemed desperate to be cool. This meant that any marketing not aimed at pensioners had the prefix “yoof” and the word “guerilla” was more associated with stunt marketing than insurgencies. Output always seemed to me measured via the Holy Grail of word of mouth. But back then this was hard, if not impossible, to quantify. And as the mechanic began to get over-used, the picture desks on the nationals, the then gold standard of coverage, began to grow weary of the overly branded stunt. So with a decline in available media coverage, a growing cynicism towards the measurement of word of mouth, and the dot com bust in 2,000 cutting budgets, clients and agencies finally tired of the guerilla stunt.

So why the return? Well, it never totally went away, but now is the perfect environment for its successful return. The once intangibility of word of mouth has gone to be replaced by very real and very measurable social media conversations, views, likes and Tweets. The Tropicana stunt received over 500,000 video views on launch day alone, before even the next day’s papers had been printed. This level of proven engagement goes a long way to justifying the investment in this type of stunt without even having to worry what the picture day. The new social and digital media eco system provides the perfect recipe to reinvent the stunt, providing not only a wide range of channels to share, discuss, and review content (in all its forms from video to written word) but also the framework to measure and analyse its impact, growth and sentiment. With this framework in place, I look forward to many more brands moving back into the stunt arena.