LG stunts it up to win PR idea of the week

It’s been everywhere over the past week that I am almost too embarrassed to write about it.

But the latest in a long line of LG stunts – who, like a handful of other brands, seem to be approaching social as content creators first and foremost and are making work that goes global – is one to learn from.

Here it is in all its glory …

But what struck me was that this is yet another example of what is, basically, an ad, making international media coverage.

While it may have started life in South America, this spot has scored coverage as widely as the UK (with the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail amongst those who have written it up), the States, most of the Far East and much of Europe.

It’s done stunningly.

And the lesson to learn of the coverage is that it’s hit in phases – whether orchestrated or otherwise, the angles that have tumbled out are a lesson in how to play out the PR around one of these stunts.

Hence, the adland sites and the tech sites are the first to pick up the story – with coverage in the US drifting across the Atlantic to start to hit in the UK. Next up, are the placed articles … “Is this the scariest interview ever?” type pieces in the national onlines that start to pick up on the creative. Then there are the stories about the ad going viral … which sort of completes the circle.

But take a look and you’ll see, arranging the pieces by date, how to spread a story and to work its angles.

Now, that aside, this piece of work also struck me as a great example of taking a core feature and turning it into a cracking story while keeping the product front-and-centre. All too often, we PRs will try and create content – or stories, for that matter – that the product is incidental within.

Here though the product is the hero of the piece – it is the very thing that the whole campaign is centred around. And the campaign is all the better for it.

We need to remember that, wherever it can be made so, the product that we’re pushing in PR can be the hero of a campaign – it is, after all, the thing that we’re selling. If it does nothing else, this creative should first of all remind us of that and give us the inspiration to push ourselves to find ways of doing so in ever more creative ways.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is founder and Managing Partner at Hope&Glory PR. He is also author of Ideas of the Year 2012: an incomplete compendium of the best ideas in PR during the year. You can buy a copy simply by emailing him.