Accusing Your Brand of Committing Crimes: Marketing Genius or Madness?
I understand that to break through the “noise” you have to sometimes be a bit outrageous…
…but accusing yourself in a press release of committing crimes is a bit over the top.
Supposedly,
…in a series of “stunts” to gain public attention for a new Apple iPhone 5 and iPad game launch, a startup went overboard causing massive property damage.
At 7:00 am, a crew drove 3 cranes, equipped with 1.5 ton wrecking balls, to a mid-city housing complex. The wrecking balls were painted to look like roundish flying Yumbies, adorable characters who smash through buildings and other structures in the game.
The headline here is pure linkbait: “iPhone 5 PR stunt ends in disaster leaving 23 homeless.” Grabs all the journos looking for a follow-up story on the iPhone 5 launch, and seeds in the delicious possibility of catching someone doing something dumb & cinematic to put on the TV news.
The press release has sucked in a few bloggers already who haven’t really bothered to go to Teh Google and look to see if there’s actually anything like this on the newswires.
Razorianfly uncritically repeats the Playgearz release. Apparently, opening up a new tab and taking 30 seconds to run a couple Google searches is a bit more due diligence than the publishing schedule allows.
The commenters on RazorianFly are pretty much on to this being a fake, however:
Surprised there isn’t more vitriol here. This post may be gone pretty soon. Expect to see this up on TechCrunch … maybe.“Jeff” is right. This didn’t happen. If there was actually wrongful demolition going on in San Francisco, the radio, TV & news sites would be lit up like Donald Trump’s eyes at seeing another bonkers conspiracy theory.Viz the lack of content and the dog totally not barking on SFGate:
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