David Hasselhoff on the Hoff or Not Campaign and how social has changed the celeb game

To their credit, the recently rebranded Golin, opened Cannes Lions festival of Creativity on Sunday.

This is the first time a PR agency has opened Cannes and shows the level of commitment that the world’s largest PR agencies have to cracking Cannes – The Hoff doesn’t come cheap!

The Hoff or Not campaign is an interesting campaign in that it shows why public relations is in a great place at the moment. Let’s not pretend anyone owns social – but the integration of a relevant celeb, audience engagement, social media channels, nice looking content, an event and a bunch of intrigued journalists with websites to fill is a nice case study of PR’s sweet spot.

The Hoff or Not campaign explores the idea that creativity only really works if the campaign is relevant to the audience. To test this hypothesis The Hoff’s fans around the world are invited to voice opinions about him. Golin will then use this content to tell us how brand Hoff has performed.

I wrote this on Wednesday and here are some initial topline numbers that suggest the campaign has captured people's imagination around the world:

• Saturday 23 million impressions of #HoffOrNot across Twitter and Instagram – launch day!
• Sunday 22.2 million impressions of #HoffOrNot across Twitter and Instagram
• Monday 1.6 million impressions of #HoffOrNot across Twitter and Instagram
• Tuesday 12.4 million impressions of #HoffOrNot across Twitter and Instagram

I was lucky enough to catch up with the Hoff on the phone, apologies for the sound quality – it was a windy day in Cannes.