Publicity stunt ideas don’t come much bigger than the one thought up by Red bull in 2012. In fact, in a poll by PRWeek, it came in as the second best publicity stunt in the world in that year. Part of what made it so attention-grabbing was the shock value: a man free-falling from the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere isn’t something you see every day of the week. In fact it was watched live by 8million people and is still being viewed on YouTube. As Guinness World Records and publicity stunt ideas go, it has to be one of the most attention-grabbing of all time.
High-octane Record Breaking
Red Bull has established itself as an energy drink; it facilitates faster transport of oxygen and nutrients to the cells, giving you a lift – so it was inevitable that they would want to associate themselves with something in the high-octane department. Felix Baumgartner’s plan was to become the first man to break the sound barrier in free-fall, before parachuting to the ground. To do this, he had to set the Guinness World Record for the longest free-fall, which he did – setting the bar at 128,000 feet.
Will he? Won’t he?
Part of what grabbed the public’s attention wasn’t so much to see whether he’d break the record, but whether he’d actually survive the attempt! This was, quite literally, a do or die situation. If the shock value wasn’t borne out by the number of people who watched the live stream, then check out the analytics for YouTube: in the first week of October building up to the first proposed jump-date, the number of subscribers grew by around 2,142 per day. On the day of the jump itself, October 14th, the numbers jumped to a staggering 87,801. That’s a big audience.
Figures not to be Sniffed at
Red Bull put up a Facebook page to mark the event, chalking up around 740,000 interactions and over 83,000 shares. When Red Bull posted a photo of the thankfully-alive Felix, down in the ground and draped in his parachute, that picture alone received 21,000 comments, 51,000 shares and around 48,000 likes. There can’t be too many brands that can claim to have had this much interaction in one day.
But there’s more: social marketing analysts Social Bakers estimate that when a post from a brand attracts 100 interactions, it actually reaches around 10,000 people. If they’re estimations are correct, then the combined weight of Twitter and Facebook mean that the Red Bull Stratos jump reached up to 50million users.
You might be looking for publicity stunt ideas to boost the profile of your brand and shock tactics are certainly a sure-fire way to get yourself noticed. While you might not want to kit your CEO up in a spacesuit and chuck him off a platform on the outskirts of Earth’s atmosphere, there are certainly other routes you can go down. Publicity stunt ideas don’t have to be dangerous to gain attention, but choosing to do something out of the ordinary can certainly have a beneficial effect on your company’s profile.
Alternatively, you could start measuring your CEO up for that spacesuit tomorrow…
