There’s an old saying that “No Press is Bad Press”— I don’t think this is from a PR person because honestly, bad press is a PAIN. It adds additional effort to fixing the problem and long hours of figuring out how to attack the crisis. But, with social media enabling a message to travel far and wide, add comments that are sometimes not moderated, how do we look at bad “press” when it ends up driving awareness?
Here’s my example. Did everyone see the Joaquin Phoenix meltdown on David Letterman from last week? Basically, he shows up in an “altered state” completely out of his mind and David Letterman, trained with experience teases him, jokes with him in the most awkward late night interview I’ve ever seen. The buzz flew around the interwebs with the YouTube video seeing over 1.3 million views! I can only imagine what his publicist was doing at the time of the show. (Probably frantically running for the Classifieds or a shot of Jack Daniels.) Word around the web was “He was on drugs” “He’s crazy” “Lost his mind”—Did you also know that Joaquin Phoenix was on to promote a movie? Not many people I talked to did unless they watched from the beginning when Letterman introduced him.
So, let’s think about this from a PR stand point. The goal of having him on the show was to promote his new movie Two Brothers which by the way had a HUGE ad push. But, as he slowly turned into joke of the week and the video gained traction on YouTube and blogs, is the movie now getting attention or just Joaquin and his crazy ways?
When thinking about the initial PR plan for the movie, I’m sure the team did NOT take this into account. Social media can make or break a PR plan in my opinion. This in some ways could actually be a “breaker” vs “maker.” What started as a simple plan for marketing a unique movie, getting the star on Letterman to promote the movie has now expanded past that and into a deeper look to the actor and cast through social media playbacks of a crazy video. From the flip side, AdAge goes into it more here and how the movie is actually doing quite well despite the Letterman meltdown.
As many client requests come in to “please make this go viral”—you can’t. You can only hope that a video of your brand gets 1.3 million views. But, would you want it to take away from your initial goal? Would you want the end result to be a mistake video getting a ton of traffic but overshadowing the main message? I don’t think so.
What do you think?
