I haven’t done my own stunts for a long time.
You’ve heard of stunt men, but what about stunt marketing?
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TRANSCRIPT:
Netflix is becoming one of the poster children for trying to command the inattention economy, hoping that they can be part of the background noise or your life rather than in the forefront of your attention.
But every now and then, they realize that they need to be a focal point, and they do something crazy like slap up a billboard over Sunset Boulevard with a man living inside it.
This happened last week, actually, and it was intended to promote the thriller movie “The Last House,” a movie about a family that’s trapped inside a house together.
Now look, sometimes, there are horror premises that really grab you because they feel like they could happen to anyone, but this idea sounds like something many of us all experienced a few years ago during the COVID shelter-in-place order, and I’ve got to be honest – making movies about being isolated, lonely, and trapped inside with your family is a little tone deaf for today’s culture.
I’m not the only one who feels this, by the way – the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score is currently 24% among critics and 28% for the audience.
And that’s probably why Netflix decided to try something really unorthodox to build some buzz for this film. They worked with someone – and I’m not sure which agency it was – to construct a billboard that looks like a house with a bay window-style room jutting out and then sent a performer and experiential producer named Nathan Shoop up there to live inside for three days.
He’d sit or stand in view of the window in a bathrobe and pajama pants and communicate with people outside by writing on a whiteboard, often using questions and sporting a confused look on his face. And yes, apparently he did take breaks and get to come down from time to time, but he was up there enough to earn Netflix a lot of attention as people flocked to Sunset Boulevard and Selma Avenue to see it.
This stunt only lasted for three days, but it was a major coup for Netflix in termed of earned media and buzz for their movie, which hit #1 despite their low reviews.
It’s a great testament to the power of a good stunt marketing campaign to build buzz where traditional media might fail. But it’s also worth asking – is stunt marketing something that ought to be part of a brand’s strategy, or is it something that’s just as likely to backfire?
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Stunt marketing has a long history in marketing and probably goes back to times and cultures before written language was even there to record them.
Getting peoples’ attention to ply your wares or promote your products has been necessary since the advent of trade and commerce, and there are many, many documented stories about people throughout the last millennium who would use some sort of exciting draw to bring curious people to their market stall, wagon or tent to pitch a sale.
But in the 20th century, stunt marketing was enhanced by mass media such as newspapers, radio and television allowing images and recordings to travel beyond local audiences and reach people who were simply looking for an interesting story.
So, for example, long before Coca-Cola and Pepsi were the dominant soda brands, there was a brand called Moxie that adapted the then-new automobiles to carry around horses.
The absurdity of seeing a horseless carriage bearing a horse was a draw, especially because the horse itself wasn’t actually real and had a steering wheel sticking out of its neck so its mounted rider could drive the car.
The Moxie horsemobiles were a popular sight in parades and other public events, and as time went on, they were constructed out of bigger and grander cars – one was even made out of a Rolls-Royce!
More recently, as I was driving through Collinsville, IL, I was passed by a red semi truck hauling a giant potato in its trailer.
I was so curious about what I’d just seen I had to investigate, and sure enough, it was an appearance of the Big Idaho Potato Truck, a stunt marketing vehicle that was created in 2012 to promote Idaho potatoes along with the American Heart Association and American Diabetes Association, and it’s operated by Idaho Potato Commission.
Their website says they send it to community events to help with fundraising and visibility, and since the trailer purports to be carrying a 4-ton potato with the phrase “Is it real?” emblazoned prominently on the trailer, it invites lots of questions as people walk up to get their picture taken with it.
Stunt marketing campaigns with vehicles have long been a popular way to stir up local media and get attention from curious onlookers – just look at the success of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, the Goodyear Blimp and the Hello Kitty Café trucks! But the problem is that, over time, what was once novel becomes ordinary and people don’t get excited about investigating these attractions anymore. They become part of the pop culture zeitgeist, sure, but they have very little opportunity to build the brand.
And so that tends to lead to more limited stunts that can take a few different forms.
One of the easiest is to provoke the public with a bizarre claim or campaign that stirs up curiosity. Back in 2015, Burger King introduced a Whopper bun that was entirely black in celebration of Halloween.
People were afraid to eat it, of course, and social media hadn’t quite evolved to what it is today to provoke people to go and try it just to make a short-form reaction video. It also actually didn’t taste that different from a regular bun.
But it got plenty of press because it was eye-catching and something you truly couldn’t get anywhere else. Burger King has since tried to recapture that magic with buns colored orange, red, green and ghostly white as well as even pink in Asia, but there’s the problem with stunt marketing once again – if you pull the same stunt over and over again, it loses its appeal, and Burger King is likely to abandon this tactic anyhow because consumers are now concerned about food dyes.
I’ll also add, many people who did try these burgers felt like the color didn’t have any impact on the flavor and complained that these products actually weren’t as good as the marketing campaigns suggested they would be.
Another Whopper-related stunt involved offering the sandwich for 1 cent … if it was ordered on the BK app from a McDonald’s parking lot. This 2018 “Whopper Detour” campaign got 1.5 million people to download the Burger King app. I’m not sure how many actually used it for the promotion, though.
Burger King’s tried other stunts in the past as well. One of their most storied was from 1998 and involved the “Left-Handed Whopper,” which they advertised as having its ingredients rotated 180 degrees so that the 32 million people who were left-handed could enjoy it.
The joke was lost on many consumers – the sandwich is shaped like a circle, folks! – and apparently, many were coming into stores asking for right-handed Whoppers instead. But it did achieve the goal of cutting through the noise and earning attention for the brand.
Here’s the thing, though. I’ll give Burger King lots of credit for knowing how to attract attention in the media. But as we’ve discussed in other episodes of this show, how often do people actually want to go and eat there for its food?
In yet another seeming stunt, the CEO handed out his phone number earlier this year and was asking people to sincerely tell him via voicemail or text how the brand could be better, and that honesty also sort of revealed the desperation behind these tactics.
I’ll stop picking on Burger King and mention some other famous stunt marketing campaigns. In 2018, the International House of Pancakes, better known as IHOP, decided to flip the P to a lower-case b and invited the public to speculate on why they were not IHOb rather than IHOP. Setting up a brand mystery like this was interesting enough to get a lot of engagement and press, even if the actual answer – the b stands for burgers, now available at IHOP! – was a big letdown.
IHOP also knew that people were going to clown on the entire thing on social media and really leaned into how silly it all was by encouraging any attention, good or bad. The business goal behind all of this was to pivot the brand without actually rebranding, and while I’m not sure it worked that well – people still mainly go to IHOP for breakfast food – it at least gave them a novel way to talk about some of their other menu options.
But let’s talk about some more recent stunts. Last year, to promote the second season of its show Severance, Apple TV put a glass enclosure in the middle of Grand Central Terminal with four cubicles inside, and then had members of the show’s cast sit at their desks and work. It generated millions in Earned Media Value and helped add some buzz to not only the show itself, which was already pretty popular thanks to memes and discussion threads on social media, but also to Apple TV.
Also last year, Canva wanted to get the word out that it’s the official design partner for the UK, and so it installed outdoor ads near London’s Waterloo gallery showing off some really amateurish billboard designs adorned with post-it notes and social media suggestions to create the idea of a work in progress using Canva’s easy-to-use design tools and collaboration features. It of course generated a lot of attention in London and spread through social media.
And then Coors Light provoked attention by putting up a billboard in Times Square that looked pretty standard, but which had a glaring typo in it. They staged an outrage campaign online, driven by an independent agency called Mischief, and then apologized for having “a case of the Mondays.” The particular Monday in question was the day after the Super Bowl, and the ad was intentionally designed to reflect the disorientation of heading back to work after the big game.
Coors even released some research to show that this was a real phenomenon, saying that 50% of people dreaded the Monday after the Super Bowl because they’d been up late, 46% hated the reality check of returning to work after the high of the night before, and 36% were bummed that the NFL season was over. Smartly, the research didn’t cite people being hung over.
Now, this stunt campaign may sound really like something that’s really inside baseball… erm, football for marketing fans – but Coors was committed to the bit and even released limited edition 12-pack cases of beer with the word Mondays in place of the Coors brand – a literal case of the Mondays.
All of this was intended to give lift and visibility to their actual Super Bowl ads, and it definitely did have an impact on social media – reportedly, mentions of the brand went up 400%.
What’s harder to determine is whether or not this stunt was savvy enough to break through beyond the people like myself who pay attention to these things.
And again, let’s return to the very premise of stunt marketing – it’s intended to draw attention through a sudden surge in interest in something new and novel.
But drawing attention doesn’t necessarily mean keeping it, and one of the realities about stunt marketing is that people who fall for it often start to feel like suckers and don’t want to play anymore after they realize that their reactions are being used to fuel a marketing campaign.
Sometimes, these stunts can also create more problems than anything else.
So, for example, when Starbucks launched a campaign in South Korea earlier this year promoting a line of “Tank” coffee tumblers in May on the 46th the anniversary date of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when pro-democracy protesters were massacred by the military, it was a stunt intended to attract attention, and it backfired, badly.
No publicity’s bad publicity, right? Well, actually, yes, in this case.
The government suspended ties with the chain, the CEO lost his job and there were public demonstrations where people rallied against the chain, smashing mugs and tumblers, deleting loyalty apps and demanded refunds for any prepaid purchases.
And the apologies from the billionaire chairman of the South Korean extension of the brand continued for weeks. It even impacted the international brand, which also had to apologize despite having nothing to do with the incident.
Another major backfire recently has been brands trying to insert AI into things. Marketers may love AI tools, but consumers hate AI, as numerous studies have already shown.
So Warner Brothers was promoting this movie called The End of Oak Street starring Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, which is about a neighborhood that gets connected to a wormhole that allows dinosaurs to run amok and which transports the houses somewhere else. It’s supposed to be a pretty good movie, actually.
But Warner Bros. made this strange announcement that it’d partnered with a podcast called DogPark featuring two AI-generated dogs interviewing an AI-created version of the dog from the film.
It’s honestly a pretty innocuous idea that would not have been controversial if it’d been produced with traditional CG animation since about half of it is clips from the movie and behind the scenes production reels, but because it’s generative AI and looks very creepy and cheap, it’s earned a lot of ire online.
One point that’s been made is that many successful movies have recently been promoting themselves online by showing how they achieved their practical effects or how they filmed their most impressive scenes. For audiences seeking more knowledge about these films, those sorts of bonuses are really exciting.
So Warner Bros. had the right idea, but took it in the wrong direction with generative AI. And while I doubt it has much influence on the actual box office returns, it certainly achieved the opposite of building excitement.
And in the end, that’s the powderkeg of unpredictability that stunt marketing can create, because Netlfix’s man living in a billboard could also have backfired if the public had not responded well to the idea or if the campaign was ignoring some important cultural undercurrent that undermined its message.
For example, Netflix just fired most of its gaming division yesterday, which could have played into a very different narrative if the man being forced to live in a billboard campaign was this week. Angry online activists could have really turned this thing around on them.
And lest you think that’s not a possibility, just ask Sony, who can’t seem to make a positive product announcement about anything right now without getting hammered by online dissenters who are mad about the destruction of physical media.
I also wonder if Netflix may have created an expectation going forward that it’s going to do cool, creative things like this to promote its new releases rather than just put up standard billboards. They’re the big brand now, but they’re also probably at their peak in terms of subscribers.
When numbers start to fall, desperation to stay relevant increases.
They may eventually find themselves in the same trap Burger King has fallen into, increasingly chasing those fleeting bursts of attention to try to stay relevant over time.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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