What other explanations and reports are needed to defend the maxim that PR affects sales, albeit indirectly?
Similar claims are made on explosive PR as well, but how on earth can you measure its impact on sales? I came up with a metaphor. Just imagine coming to a premiere or a Super Bowl game, or the NHL finals, or a popular stage production of a Broadway musical.
You neednt imagine yourself a businessman because this is what you are, so you watch a game or a stage production, the brilliant play of the actors, and have fun.
Can you see how this might affect your sales? There will be some effect, but you are at a loss for precise estimation. The sure positive effect is feeling fine, experiencing a catharsis, and having deep moral satisfaction.
Now imagine being in the center of that game, the main star who scored a decisive goal or a winning touchdown. What do you feel?
Extreme, a surge of adrenaline, your heart leaping for joy. Its a rush and a kick for you. In the same token, explosive PR is about the INNER STATE.
Apart from a higher conversion rate, the number of brand queries, coverage, etc., the main benefit of explosive PR is the new inner state.
And this is real buzz or bliss-out worth experiencing at least once in a lifetime.
And like my friend and Nietzsche wannabe Anthony The Inquisitor Kirsanov would put it, whatever does not kill us can be tried once again!
Theoretical Framework of Explosive PR
Explosive PR did not originate out of nowhere. However, this is how it is now perceived by my numerous rivals. The number of explosive PR agencies keeps growing. Yet, there are only five real professionals in this trade: Anton Vuima, Oleg Voronin, Maksim Perlin, Misha Chernyshev, and Oleg Matveychev4, the guru of all gurus.
Explosive PR has a host of friends: newsjacking, guerilla marketing, viral video, flash mob, pranks, art actionism, cats, sexvertising, experience-marketing, shockvertising, mem-marketing, memjacking, ambush-marketing, hashtag jacking, and marketing shticks.
Works of fiction and cinematography, rather than related areas, that motivated me to tackle explosive PR. Here is the best theoretical framework for those who want to be fearless of explosive PR:
Wag the Dog movie a screen adaptation of Larry Beinharts American Hero,
The Black Mirror series,
The Absolute Power mini-series,
Christopher Buckleys Little Green Men,
Ears That Wag the Ass, a book by Russian authors who are currently employed as Kremlin spin doctors
The authors of the above-listed works present PR as it should be: salient, creative, and stunning, but it is nothing like that. In agencies and corporations, PR comes down to press release mailing, press tours, and conferences. I was bored doing these kinds of things for 10 years, so I decided to return the original sense to PR: foolhardiness, recklessness, and flamboyancy. If these are present, PR is destined to be efficient.
PR Needs More Balls!
When I heard Fred Cooks5 coined phrase PR needs more balls6, I knew I wasnt the only one concerned with PR desalination.
My outlook on the future of PR is simply that PR needs more balls and I translate balls to mean courage. As PR people, we are known for swimming in our swim lanes and playing nice in the sandbox, he said. But this is our opportunity to not play so nice in the sandbox.
Were looking at whether the term PR is still the right term.
It needs a broader definition to include everything we do, and we have to do a lot to change minds and show what were capable of7.
In this book Ill tell you how:
ideas launch new businesses,
I come up with ideas,
the info explosion or splash is achieved,
you seed news,
explosive promo actions are conducted,
Ill also share cases from my portfolio.
Why I Wrote This Book And For Whom?
I console myself that Im not the only madman in this world. I would like to meet other spin doctors like me. Why? So we can do something exciting together and know there is more positive, interesting, and hilarious news around us. The news is horrid at least in this country.
Interesting invented news makes people smile, makes things fun, and allows us to marvel at the things around us.
And if business objectives are addressed against this background, like entering a new market or launching new products or mobile apps, then this is a win-win approach.
Youre welcome to enter the world of Explosive PR if you are:
a spin doctor or marketing analyst prone to inventing news and willing to do something special in Russia for yourself or your clients,
a startup entrepreneur interested in rising to fame,
an experienced business person eager to jolt the market and recharge your batteries,
a PR conference organizer eager to meet an interesting speaker and cases from Russia
Find my contacts at the end of this book.
Lets plunge into the fascinating world of explosive PR and Ill share everything I know.
Even if you use my technology independently, without my involvement, or refine it, Ill be happy!
Make PR Great Again!
Ten Ways to Come Up With a Creative Idea For an Explosive Promo Event
I love the creative process. I do what I do out of pure enjoyment. Hopefully, nobody does it better. Theres a beauty to making a great deal. Its my canvas. And I like painting it.8
Donald Trump
Im a painter. Media is my canvas and ideas are my paints. Some works were done for a mass audience and some only for connoisseurs. To produce better work, you should continue painting, being creative, and implementing ideas.
A good idea means a more than halfway successful explosive PR campaign.
News must evoke the desire to print and reprint it, press a like button near it, and repost it. Ill explain in this article how to make this type of news.
1. Dictionary Divination. This method was invented by a well-known PR man from St. Petersburg, Anton Vuima, the author of Black PR.
Heres the gist of his method. You keep the business youre promoting in your mind. You take a dictionary of the Russian language, open it to any page, and point your finger at a random word. Whatever it is, your task is to align it with your client and invent a promo action. The case study where a watch worth 200,000 euro was drowned in the Neva is described by Anton in the following video at the end of the third minute.9
How does this work? I dont know, but it does. This is possibly the psyche or help from Heaven, I cant tell you for sure. But it works like it worked for the detective from Twin Peaks. Do you remember him guessing suspects, setting up bottles, and flinging stones at them? When his guess was correct, a stone would break the glass. He didnt know how it worked, but it did. Does it really matter how? Just use it.
How does this work? I dont know, but it does. This is possibly the psyche or help from Heaven, I cant tell you for sure. But it works like it worked for the detective from Twin Peaks. Do you remember him guessing suspects, setting up bottles, and flinging stones at them? When his guess was correct, a stone would break the glass. He didnt know how it worked, but it did. Does it really matter how? Just use it.
2. Thinking in Paradoxes. Coming up with paradoxes means inventing centaurs, that is aligning two seemingly and fundamentally incompatible things like a man with the body of a horse. As the saying goes, When a dog bites a man, its not news, but when a man bites a dog thats a sensation. Or a man went hunting with his dog and was attacked by a dog. Youll be laughing, but that was real news somewhere in Europe.
Think of someone for whom youll never be able to provide your services, or of the product you would not sell to anybody under no circumstances.
What client would make you laugh at his/her oddity? When you have the answers to these questions or remember something from your real life and smile, you are on the right path.
One example: we were boosting a coupon web site. What cannot be sold at a discount? We were racking our brain and then came up with the answer: indulgences! That was how we came out with the action: Selling indulgences at a discount: the bid is valid till Doomsday. The outcome: 10 TV reports and a 10-fold increase in the website traffic during the week. till Doomsday that deadline was not picked accidentally but in full compliance with point 3: Agenda.
3. Agenda (How Newsjacking Works for You and Your Business). Your task is hooking events of the day to your business using the following algorithm: look up the sources (YandexNews, Twitter Trends, Mediametrics top news, the main page of LiveJournal), choose what is relevant for your business, and then dovetail. If you come up with a centaur, great!
Case study. We promoted a translation agency at the Student Games in Kazan. The idea was for a youthful translator to declare her love in 68 languages but for whom? The action was ready, it remained to find a heartthrob. We looked through news the day before and saw that an athlete from Uganda had been administered to the hospital with malaria. That was our hero! If the news were about a female athlete, our action would have a lesbian skew. Well, someone was lucky enough to get limelight on Channel 1 after a report in Life10, in addition to a multitude of publications on the Internet.
4. TIPS-Thinking (TRIZ). I am not a TIPS-savvy person. I just visited one workshop and read the books of Altshuller, Anatoly Grin, and Sergey Faer. This was more than enough for me to understand: The more you know about the problem specification, the clearer its solution is.
When you properly formulate the problem, you already find more than a half of solution. One day, a large retail chain suffered from info bullying: a certain unidentified citizen complained to the media that he poisoned himself with a food product that should not have stayed on the shelf. He preferred anonymity and introduced himself on behalf of an organization that did not confirm his membership. Yet his photos and persona were chewed over by many leading media outlets. How to get rid of the blemish? We considered several responses, but then it dawned on us that since the blow was anonymous, so should the counterblow. In the upshot, a repentance letter was sent where the same person confessed he had concocted the whole thing for the sake of cheap fame. Several hours later, the news hit the top YandexNews.10
I learned one more thing at the TIPS workshop. Unless you know how to deal with competition, do the opposite. It is by following this advice of Sergey Faer that a girl won the Mayoral election in a Turkish city.
Or here is another story. One of the Russian cities was shattered by social unrest. Later, public meetings were banned, but the problem remained. Then dolls and toys were out at the meeting.
@ ivan krupchik
There was a meeting without any gathering of people, with just picket signs in view. One could draw inspiration from looking at this lovely outrage.11
TIPS is a very useful, multifaceted methodology for creativity with huge potential of addressing various issues from household and social to public and industrial hidden inside12. Made in Russia by Genrikh S. Altshuller.
5. Chinese Whispers and Slips of the Tongue. On one occasion, I consulted video producer Den Pe regarding the promo event a nude girl at the steering wheel. Because of poor liaison, we had the following conversation:
Den, whats your opinion about the action nude girl at the steering wheel of a car-sharing service?
Whos at the steering wheel of what?
Nude girl! Car-sharing!
Nude traffic cop?
What kind of nude traffic cop? I am talking about a nude girl, car-sharing. Isnt it cool?
No, a nude traffic cop is cooler.
And how can I do it??
Think for yourself.
And I thought of something. The promo event cracked TOP-5 Yandex news for Moscow.
6. Thanks, Stand-up! Gag-men and stand-up comedians tighten up their jokes, bringing trivial facts to absolute paradox. This is exactly what we need! Comedians also like applying unusual circumstances to usual goods (A supermarket cashier has such an overbearing voice that everyone would take a bag).
Gag-men often invent non-existent goods (detachable arm with a manicured finger, sandy ass, feet in champagne, or Bentleys steering wheel goods for those who would like to upload good photos in Instagram). In case of explosive PR, such goods are invented not to sell, but to hit the headlines (indulgences at a discount, a coupon for life with a millionaire, and more).
So just type the name of your product or sphere of business in YouTube and then use such words as humor, stand-up, comedy, and youll have some good ideas. Just dont forget to thank a standup comedian!
7. Associations. I described this method in my Boosting a Super Company long ago and have been applying it successfully since 2006. I was then promoting a simultaneous translation bureau. Looking for associations, such as what else could be simultaneous or synchronized, I hit upon synchronized swimming.
As a result, Olympic champions in synchronized swimming became the honored clients of the translation agency Synchronist.13
8. Maslennikovs Matrix Help You Create More Than 200 Crazy Ideas. This method is about dividing a sheet of paper into two columns. You write interesting objects in one celeb, politician, transvestite, porn star, strip dancer, etc., while in another column you describe some shocking actions: burnt, killed, raped, brawled, stepped in a cake, etc. Then, randomly match words from the first and second columns, fitting your business into the scheme.