A conversation this morning reminded me that real news has a nasty habit of getting in the way of your story or event as I mentioned back in June over the Conran donation to the Design Museum.
Last week Remember a Charity got a lot of pick up for this stunt with Rocky Taylor throwing himself from a burning ‘building’. Here’s the video:
Creativity is increasingly important and this got coverage because it was a lot more than a simple stunt.
1) Rocky is a world class stuntman
2) He’s 64 – which is probably 500 in stunt years
3) The stunt he was doing nearly killed him last time he tried it in 1985, so a real sense of jeopardy
4) The stunt actually tied back to the core message – ‘when you make a will think about charities as well’. I’d imagine anyone about to do a ‘death defying’ stunt would make sure they’d organised their will.
This was a straight media opportunity which went well – Rocky survived. I have no doubt it cost a fortune. They had numerous cameras and the insurance on a man repeating something that nearly killed him 26 years ago can’t have been cheap. However also think about how lucky they were with the timing.
Just a week later these were the images that were dominating the news:
Let’s be honest would you want to be staging that stunt this week? Even if you did, do you think any news outlet would want to run it? If anything the charity would have almost certainly come in for criticism for trivialising something we had just seen for real on the front page of many of the
So when you’re risk assessing a media activity remember to allow for the possibility of real news either meaning you get no coverage or even worse that you have to call the whole thing off, possibly at great expense.
