Stunts

Stunts are an increasingly popular campaign tactic. As they are designed to be visual, and often amusing, they are attractive to the media, and lend themselves well to use on video-sharing websites.

While also public, compared to demonstrations, stunts will involve far fewer people, and should therefore be easier to execute.

It is really important that the stunt clearly links to your campaign message and a still image of the stunt can convey something of its substance.

And given that stunts are mostly designed to get media attention, make sure you contact the press well in advance! If, for whatever reason, you are not able to get press to the stunt itself, make sure you take high quality photos of it yourself, and send them, along with a press release to editors of relevant newspapers or magazines.

Case study

Friends of the Earth launched a campaign called ‘Final Demand’ in October 2011 demanding that energy companies provide cheaper and cleaner fuel to households across the UK. The video below shows a stunt which took place outside Westfield shopping centre in London and it also tied in with an online petition that supporters could sign.

For the stunt FOE campaigners stood outside Westfield and pretended to be from one of the ‘big six’ UK energy companies. With a second glance you can see the slight changes in the energy company names. This stunt caught a lot of people’s attention as you can see in the video, not only the people who stopped and listened would have grasped what was happening, it was a busy area and there would have been others walking past whose attention would have been caught.

Case study

Everyman’s ‘Prostrate for Prostrate’ stunt

The charity Everyman, which provides support and advice to men with prostrate and testicular cancer, carried out a stunt by getting 24 men (representing the number of men who die each day in the UK from these diseases) to lie ‘prostrate’ in the street. The stunt was timed to coincide with the start of Everymans’ annual Cancer Awareness Month. At the same time, they launched an ad campaign that replicated (and therefore reinforced) the imagery of the stunt. The stunt and ad campaign were designed to highlight the need for more funding into research. 

©Everyman

So, the stunt ticked a number of important boxes:

• It was visual.
• It had a sense of fun behind it.
• The stunt’s nature had a clear symbolic connection to their campaign messages (i.e. 24 men in the stunt to represent 24 deaths a day, and lying down still, or ‘prostrate’)
• There was a campaign ‘ask’. The stunt was designed to bring attention to their fundraising appeal (although there could be any number of other practical outcomes you might seek from your stunt).
• They designed it to get media attention, and issued a press release about it to connect the stunt to the issues behind it.
• It integrated well into another strand of their work i.e. their ad campaign. While you may not have the resources to run an integrated campaign, there is something powerful about being able to reinforce messages through different media.

For lots of inspiration about great stunts, visit Taylor Herring Public Relation’s 50 Top Publicity Stunts.