Getting the branding right on a PR stunt - a lesson from Pimm’s

If you work in PR, you probably didn’t miss last week’s Pimms stunt. Or rather, you probably didn’t miss the pictures that made it pretty much everywhere of a giant deckchair on a beach. In Bournemouth.

Here’s a deckchair on Bournemouth Beach …

Now every agency pitching a stunt like this will have the same conversation with the client, exhorting their client to “keep the branding low in the pictures so that the editorial carries the story … the write-up HAS to include the brand mention to explain the presence of the image”.

But on this occasion, for my money (and apologies to those concerned if this is controversial), the brand delivery just wasn’t prominent enough. I suspect that there will have been agency teams with their heads in their hands as some great pictures were carried but the brand name dropped (at worst) or only incidentally mentioned (at best) in the accompanying editorial.

Looking at these picture stories with the benefits of glorious hindsight (always 20:20 vision, as the footballing phrase goes), perhaps they could have borne just a little more branding and yet still been editorial-friendly enough to run.

For anyone who has a campaign like this (and God knows, I’ve been there myself), it’s good to look back and learn.

For the rest of us, there is always benefit in learning from other people’s work so our own campaigns are the better – and so that we’re not reminded of this lesson the hard way!

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR and from time-to-time pens Spinning Around, a blog that he describes as “thinking out loud”