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  With This Stunt,
I Thee Wed
To promote its “Wedding Sundays” lineup, WE TV leaves bridezillas at the altar and ends up on a publicity honeymoon with 50 million media impressions.
“Marriage is a three-ring circus,” the saying goes, “engagement ring, wedding ring, and suffering.” Nowhere is that snarky sentiment more true than on “Bridezillas,” a Women’s Entertainment (WE) TV reality show where glowing brides-to-be go Lord of the Flies all over their families, grooms, bridesmaids, and anyone else that gets in their way faster than you can say “I do.”
Acting like Somali pirates
in white poofy gowns, the
petulant princesses turned
“Bridezillas” into the
12-year-old cable network’s
most notorious show for each
of the last four seasons. Pro-moting the program, then,
was a piece of wedding
cake. With the help of
The Michael Alan
Group Inc., a New
York-based event-
production and
guerrilla-marketing
company, WE TV
had arranged
“Survivor”-
style publicity
stunts over
the last four years, such as the “Running of the Brides,” where 20 blushing brides in full wedding trousseau sprinted down an AstroTurf-covered track and vaulted over an 8-foot-high climbing wall slathered in cake frosting to win $25,000 for the victor’s nuptials.
 Then there was “Bridezillas Take the Cake,” when the network challenged 20 bridezillas — clad in wedding gowns — to cram as much cake into their pie holes as they could in two minutes, again for $25,000. The stunts were as popular with the media as an open bar at a reception, gathering more than 100 million media impressions each.
But when WE TV wanted to promote not just an individual show but its entire “Wedding Sundays” programming block for the 2009 season (a line up that included soft-focus fare such as “Rich Bride, Poor Bride” and “My Fair Wedding”), it needed a change of stunt strategy. Instead of showing the wedding belles from hell at their narcissistic and predatory worst, the network needed a kinder, gentler event that would somehow generate an equal amount of attention. “We wanted to get away from stunts that showed bridezillas in ‘take no prisoners’ mode, because that didn’t project at all the image WE wanted for its other shows,” says Jessica Murphy, vice president of The Michael Alan Group.
Together, the network and The Michael Alan Group kicked around several ideas, including a “wedding stimulus package” where brides would tear through countless gift-wrapped boxes in search of the one packed with thousands of dollars in cash. Or maybe, they thought, just build the world’s largest champagne fountain in Times Square and drink in the publicity from the Guinness-worthy achievement. But nothing really popped their champagne cork. “Every year it gets harder to top ourselves,” says Alice Rao, WE TV’s vice president of public relations.
 Then a member of the WE TV event production team had an inspiration: No wedding makes the vow of “Till death us do part” seem more poignant than a military one — especially in a time of conflict when the groom or the bride are faced with an uncertain future. What if WE TV produced a stunt that evoked a scene witnessed as far back as collective human memory stretches, from Achilles in the Trojan War to the rawest recruit in the Iraqi conflict — couples celebrating their love of country and each other despite the strain of their personal sacrifices.
The plan was to host live weddings for couples with at least one member in the military who would soon be deployed overseas. With the average wedding running $28,000, WE TV’s dowery for cash-strapped soldiers would make a benevolent contrast to the bridezillas’ bottomless greed. Calling it “Operation: I Do,” WE TV hoped the stunt would replace the bridezillas’ self-centeredness with the couples’ poignancy.
WE TV met with representatives of the United Service Organizations Inc. (USO) to ask for its help in finding eligible couples. Known for serving free coffee to lonely soldiers in its hundreds of centers worldwide, and for its “Camp Shows” that bring celebrities to the combat zones, the 68-year-old Arlington, VA-based nonprofit USO helped connect WE TV with officials in the Department of Defense (DOD).
Working with the DOD over a period of about three months, beginning in April, the network located several hundred candidates. After listening to their individual stories, WE TV whittled the list down to five couples, whose narratives of love of country and each other touched them the most. Then, one month before the June 17 event, WE TV alerted a mix of approximately 300 local and national print, TV, and Web media outlets by e-blast. The network followed up on the initial e-mail blast with other blasts a week before, the day before, and on the morning of the event.
Three days before the ceremonies took place, WE TV flew the five couples to New York to allow sufficient time for rehearsals and dress fittings, and to legally acquire a New York state wedding license, which couples are required to obtain at least 24 hours prior to the wedding. Rising at 4 a.m. the day of the weddings, the couples gathered in a small sliver of Times Square known, fittingly, as Military Island. The location itself was a natural magnet for  media and crowds. Renowned for its supernova-bright neon signs and the annual New Year’s Eve ball drop, the iconic Times Square receives nearly 500,000 visitors a day, according to the Times Square Alliance.
Despite gray skies and an icy downpour, hundreds gathered by the 8 a.m. start time in the middle of rush hour to watch the five couples pledge their love. Cell-phone cameras clicked and video cameras recorded the exchange of vows before an Army chaplain. After the legalities were over, the newly wedded couples strolled under a traditional arch of swords, followed by a dance, while “American Idol” singer Melinda Dolittle serenaded them. Then they noshed on a military-themed cake crafted by a designer from WE TV’s “Amazing Cakes” show, and sped off to their hotel in wedding-gown white WE TV-branded pedicabs with “Just Married” painted on the back.
While the ceremony for the couples might have been short and sweet, for WE TV the results were long and lucrative. Cumulatively, the event generated an estimated 50 million impressions, roughly 25 percent above the network’s target. The coverage ranged from features on morning and evening news shows, to print, radio, and online outlets including CNN, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Huffington Post, and Jezebel, one of the most influential by-women-for-women Web sites in the United States.
By pairing itself with a new PR stunt strategy that was nice instead of nasty, WE TV entered a media marriage made in heaven.
  There Will be
Blood Drives
To promote its newest version of the Resident Evil video game, Capcom Entertainment Inc. produces a stunt that proves you can do well by doing good.
Zombies are the new black. Whether it’s best-selling books such as “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” and “I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas,” or box-office hits whose gory gamut runs from “Shaun of the Dead” to “Zombieland,” zombies have overrun the world like, well, zombies since the word first entered the English language around 1871. But creating an effective stunt to publicize a video game full of the undead can be more difficult than finding fresh, delicious brains.
That’s what San Mateo, CA-based Capcom Entertainment Inc. realized when it wanted to promote its new Resident Evil 5 (RE5) game after it launched last March. Debuting in 1996, the video game series’ plot revolves around bio-engineered viruses and parasites that infect humans and turn them into rabid, drooling zombie-like creatures whose objective is to devour you alive.
The wildly popular games have sold 14 million copies in the United States in the last 13 years, according to the Port Washington, NY,
research company NPD Group Inc., making it the 28th best-selling video game series in history. So promoting an over-the-top game with equally over-the-top publicity stunts would seem to go together like hot cocoa and marshmallows.
 But Capcom had some challenges even tougher than staving off hordes of zombies. These one-shot stunts have a way of boomeranging back to bite their creators in the rear like a cannibal on a high-protein diet. When the company promoted a 2004 spin-off called Resident Evil: Outbreak, it set up a Web site where you could send unsolicited text messages to anyone else’s cell phone. The messages typically read something along the lines of: “Outbreak: I’m infecting you with t-virus, my code is ******. Forward this to 60022 to get your own code and chance to win prizes. More at t-virus.co.uk.” The panic was as real as the virus was fake, and Capcom ended up with more egg on its face than a fly in a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast.
Then there was the more recent example that had become a cautionary tale for the whole industry. In 2007, Sony Corp. promoted its God of War II game in Athens by presenting an assemblage of journalists with the headless carcass of a goat. The reporters were then served a soup supposedly made of steaming hot entrails, while topless sirens dipped grapes into the scribes’ waiting mouths.
Excessive as it was, the story spiraled out of control with more exaggerations than a Town Hall meeting on death panels, as rumors spread that Sony staff cheerfully asked the attendees to shove their hands inside the horned ruminant’s hulk and invited them to slurp down the ropy goat intestines inside like strands of bloody pasta. (There was no inappropriate contact with the goat, and the entrail soup was actually a traditional Greek one made with meat.) Embarrassed, Sony issued a hara-kiri-like apology for what became known as “Goatgate.” The lesson of a spectacular stunt screw-up wasn’t lost on Capcom. “I was pretty much anti-stunt by this point,” says Melody Ann Pfeiffer, Capcom’s senior PR manager.
But when Fortyseven Communications Inc. pitched a different kind of event that would stand the gore-is-more strategy on its head, Pfeiffer listened. The Los Angeles-based PR company’s idea was simplicity itself — Resident Evil does good. Instead of the standard tasteless event that would gross out even Beavis and Butthead, it suggested a blood drive. The event would playfully invoke the copious amounts of hemoglobin spilled in the game but also draw media attention because it belied the cliché image of video game players and their manufacturers. “It was bulletproof,”
Pfeiffer says. “It would
generate more PR
value by being less
outrageous.”
Capcom decided
to stage the event in
Los Angeles at the
World of Wonder
Storefront Gallery,
a showplace for
pop culture artwork, which
received a thumbs-up from
the American Red Cross.
The event would take place
on the day the game was
released: Friday, March 13.
To drum up attention for the blood drive,
Capcom issued a major
media alert (followed by
three reminders) to its database of several
thousand journalists,
including industry media, as well as registered
users three weeks before
the event. Given the rather
intense loyalty of its users,
developed over the series’
13-year history, Capcom
also posted event
information on
Capcom-Unity.com,
the company’s official community site with user forums
and news relevant to the
Capcom gaming community.
The information Capcom posted described the event, luring participants with chances to win Xbox 360 consoles and copies of the game, play RE5, and take home one-of-a-kind collectibles. Those interested
could show up any time
between 11 a.m. and
5 p.m., but were urged
to schedule appointments
online by filling out a form
and sending it to Fortyseven
Communications, which would then issue registered participants a confirmation and time to arrive.
On the morning of Friday the 13th, attendees started lining up at World of Wonder more than an hour before the doors opened. By the time the event began, the line snaked almost a block long. Inside, more than eight Red Cross personnel and a total of six members of the Capcom and Fortyseven Communications staff took those with appointments first, and, when there was an opening, the drop-ins on a first-come, first-bled basis.
Upon entering the gallery, each attendee was registered in a drawing to win copies of the RE5 game and custom-made, crimson-colored Xbox 360 consoles. The donors then proceeded to give blood at any of eight stations set up in the gallery. As Red Cross workers drew their blood, donors  observed four different posters that adorned the walls. Designed specifically for the event, each one depicted cartoon characters armed for zombie slaying, with taglines that played on blood types: “B Evil Give Blood” read one, while another declared, “Give Evil A Shot.” Afterward, donors snacked on crackers, cookies, and blood oranges to regain their strength.
Once they were fortified, attendees played RE5 at any of four kiosks, while waiting for the hourly raffles of the game and the giveaway of four crimson-colored Xbox 360s at the end of the day. Whether they won a prize or not, every visitor left with a copy of one of the posters as well as branded bumper stickers and pins.
If there was anything better than the donors’ good deeds that day, it was Capcom’s results. Covering the bloody event as it unfolded were local radio stations, the area Fox television affiliate, and Geek Magazine. Online, the event received coverage from a slew of heavy hitters such as Wired.com, Kotaku, Joystiq, GameSpot, Game-Informer, G4, and more.
In all, the event generated an estimated 5 to 7 million media impressions, roughly 50 percent more than Capcom’s original target. And the blood drive drew 200 people, 13 percent above the company’s goal. For Capcom, the event helped RE5 become the best-selling video game that March, while for the Red Cross, the event collected enough blood to save a projected 177 lives. For both, it was a bloody good show.
 The Running of the
Texas Longhorns
Chrysler Group LLC steers attention to its new Dodge Ram 1500 pickup at the North American International Auto Show with a herd of 150 Texas Longhorns.
The North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) and publicity stunts have always gone together like sport cars and middle-aged guys with toupees. Back in 1973 at the NAIAS, for example, the Soviets posed a model in a fur bikini on top of one of its Lada jeeps, and at the 1950 show, Cadillac upholstered a car in leopard pelts and plated it in gold. But those were mere hood ornaments compared to Auburn Hills, MI-based Chrysler Group LLC, who once crashed a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon through a plate-glass window at the NAIAS, and at another show drove a Jeep up a mock mountain it had built just for the event.
But for the 2008 NAIAS, Chrysler Group’s Dodge division wanted to cast the media spotlight on the 2009 Dodge Ram 1500 that it was introducing at the show. To do that, it needed a stunt that would hog the publicity road from its longtime competitor, Ford Motor Co., which planned to unveil its new F-150 truck at the show as well. “We talked about how we wanted to separate the Ram from the rest of the herd,” says Richard Deneau, Chrysler Group’s director of product and brand communications. “So we literally separated the Ram from a herd — of cattle.”
 That idea evolved into a full-on publicity stunt with enough P.T. Barnumesque moxie to make people stop and gawk. The company began plans to stage a cattle drive in front of the Cobo Center, where the NAIAS is located. “Chrysler has a history of very visual events, so we decided, ‘Let’s go big,’” Deneau says. Someone had heard of a ranch in Oklahoma that bred Texas Longhorns. The cattle, the company discovered, had appeared in numerous parades and rodeos, which meant they were accustomed to crowds and probably wouldn’t stampede the streets of Detroit. The automaker arranged to haul 150 of the iconic cattle to a farm an hour’s drive north of Detroit, where a dozen cowboys could rehearse the bovines before their big day.
Meanwhile, a month before the show, Chrysler sent just one e-mail to a core of about 300 journalists. Representing 5 percent of the estimated 6,000 print, television, radio, and online media that typically attend the NAIAS, they were what the company deemed the top domestic journalists covering the automobile industry. The e-mail gave away little, except the date, the time, and the hint that Chrysler was going to do something big.
On Sunday, Jan. 20, one day after the show opened, a crowd of journalists began to congregate on Washington Boulevard directly in front of the convention center. A helicopter buzzed overhead, Chrysler staff passed out Dodge-branded beef jerky, and just as the crowd began to wonder why they were standing out in the cold, the bull’s shift hit the fan.
Turning the corner two blocks down onto Washington Boulevard was the herd of 150 longhorns coming straight at the crowd. With the cowboys on quarter horses flanking the steers, the scene looked like a John Wayne cattle drive. The steers moseyed down the street with two of the new Dodge Ram 1500 pickups alongside the herd, while reporters took pictures and a film crew in the hovering helicopter covered it from above. “Keep an eye on yonder horizon,” said Jim Press, Chrysler’s vice chairman, as two of the new Dodge Ram 1500 pickups broke away from the herd to signify how the truck stood apart from its competitors.
The cattle drive took just 15 minutes, but the effects lasted for weeks. Chrysler’s goal was for the Ram 1500 to emerge as the most-talked-about vehicle — not just truck — at the 2008 NAIAS, and it achieved exactly that. The stunt helped Chrysler generate more than 500 pieces in print, on television, and online, more than any other vehicle, in the week of the show alone. That same coverage also generated 15 million media impressions, more than anyone else, and nearly 25 percent more than Ford. Tapping into its tradition of extreme PR stunts, Chrysler’s cattle drive helped propel the Ram into the forefront — and that’s no bull.e
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