A more subtle PR stunt from New Zealand as they continue to connect with Middle Earth

 It’s been a stunt-tastic week this week and there has been a lot to choose from.

From adidas’ Ebeneezer Snoop to the Red Bull musical corner shop, social fun and games with TomTom to Warehouse’s Twelve Days of Christmas.

However, I thought that I would call out this little piece of loveliness …

New Zealand has been going to town with its Middle Earth associations. Whether the international premiere – which saw every star going hit the red carpet – or the Air New Zealand safety film, the island nation has been capitalising on its status.

However, this, altogether subtler and somehow cuter piece of activity managed not just to get people to (once again) like the nation with its Middle Earth tie-in, it also managed to show just how bloody nice the weather is over there.

Managing to find a way – through a stunt – of getting your weather broadcast across the world simply by getting a weather man to talk nonsense into a camera for a minute or so is no mean feat.

And I think that it points to a flaw in so many PR stunts – particularly in a digital age.

Too often I think that PRs reach for the ridiculous idea that will get the brand talked about, but won’t actually land the messages. Too often we go for the cheap win, rather than really sit back and think harder about how to get the grubby, commercial messages through to the punters we want to have hear them.

In this instance, however, some cunning so-and-so at New Zealand Tourism has worked out smartly how to create a piece of “editorial” content that shows punters just what they want them to see with a wall-to-wall screen of sunshine.

What this reminds me is that, when we think hard enough, there is usually a way to come up with a better response to some of the requirements of the briefs we see than “yeah, we’ll include that as part of the on-going activity” or “no, that message is just too commercial to get across in digital content – it’ll be an ad …”.

Tackling that sort of problem with some creative thinking is what should get all of us in PR up in the morning.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR. He’s now working on a book – Antics Roadshow: an incomplete compendium of stunts, stories and japes. He’s looking for submissions, so if you’ve got work that should be included head here.