Great Van Persie PR stunt from Coral

To the list of betting brands honoured for jumping the stunt bandwagon we can now add a new name as Coral cleaned up with last week’s stunt.

Betting companies’ PR teams are notoriously quick to jump on the back of an opportunity – think Paddy Power, with the raft of daft campaigns to their name, and BetFair, never shy of a spot of media attention.

Last week Coral piggy-backed the transfer news last week with this:

The truth of the matter is that this isn’t a 100 per cent original idea

It’s a different take on something that Betfair did with Tevez, but the resemblance is more than passing (as this METRO piece points out).

But does that matter? Not a jot. Not to the media and certainly not to the fans.

Why it works

Simple really … right idea, right time, right place.

Sure, the pun is a cute one; “Removal Van Persie” gives a story that raises a smile – and gives the subs a cracking headline.

But this stunt also got people talking online – and it was that talkability that helped to make it a bigger story editorially: journalists saw people talking about the Coral stunt online so it feels like they gave it more space as a result.

The fact that it got a good show on the big news sites meant more people talked about it and so the virtuous circle rolled.

The insight there is that sometimes you need to work hard to get people talking about you as a brand. Smart brands know what existing communities want to talk about, who and where they are and create branded content that will stir them up.

In this case, the team “dropped” a cracking gag into a community of people – Arsenal fans in social media – who are always up for a spot of online banter and would therefore spread the word.

Nice work indeed that demonstrates what can be achieved by some quick thinking, a fast response to the news and the right piece of content aimed at the right audience.

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”.