- I bet you think you've seen it all, ha?
(laughs)
Yeah, keep watching.
So advertising has been around for a very long time,
and it's a tough business
especially in today's world
where the average person is subjected
to as many as 5000 advertisements a day.
But somewhere along the line,
somebody figured out how to break through all of that noise.
Publicity stunts.
Like advertisements on steroids,
these often shocking or even dangerous events are designed
to grab your attention at all costs.
So today we're looking at the most effective,
the most interesting,
and even the most dangerous publicity stunts
ever carried out.
And trust me, you won't be expecting these.
So let's get right into it.
These are the 10 craziest publicity stunts of all time.
Number one is The Leap From Space.
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager,
an air force officer and test pilot,
was the first person ever to break the sound barrier
in a rocket powered aircraft.
Exactly 65 years later, in New Mexico,
Red Bull decided to help an Austrian man do the same.
The only thing is, they decided to do it
without the use of a plane.
In a gigantic publicity stunt,
43 year old Felix Baumgartner became the second person
in history to break the sound barrier
without any engine power.
He climbed in a balloon to 38,969 meters above Earth
and then jumped, literally from the edge of space.
Felix's plunge from Earth's stratosphere
took over nine minutes
and had him moving at nearly 1,358 kilometers per hour
for most of it.
The feat was watched by over 52 million people
through webcasts alone.
Not to mention the millions who watched it on live TV
or played the feed on Loop.
Baumgartner's stunt became the most watched live stream
in history and managed to raise Red Bull's sales by over 7%.
Number two is The Frozen Man.
Some magicians do card tricks,
while others pull bunnies out of a hat,
while others encase themselves in a giant block of ice.
Quite simply the leader in the field
of magical publicity stunts,
Blaine rarely disappoints.
On November 27, 2000 in Times Square, New York City,
the magic man had himself encased
in a colossal block of ice.
A stunt that he called, Frozen in Time.
Using only three tubes, one for air,
one for water and one for urine,
Blaine stood on the spot for nearly 64 hours,
remaining in complete view of the public
through the thick blocks of ice.
Once his time was up,
chainsaws were needed to free him from the ice,
and he was rushed to the nearest hospital due to fears
that he might go into shock.
Though he claims that it took over a month
to recover from the publicity stunt,
Blaine would go on to do even more endurance filled feats.
These included standing on a 30 metre high pole for 35 hours
and living in a glass box without food for 44 days.
Number three is The Skydiving Car.
It's one thing for a person to want to live dangerously
by doing things crazy, like bungee jumping,
hang gliding or skydiving but when a car does it,
we're on a whole new level of insanity.
To promote their new car, the Sonic Sedan in a fresh,
cool and exciting way, Chevrolet decided to show
that their new model had its own thirst for adventure.
On September 22, 2011,
the company had five professional skydivers,
armed with cameras,
leap from a plane high over the Arizona desert with a car.
Yes that's right.
A car rolled off a C-130 plane
at 4.3 kilometers in the air just
to show that it enjoyed new things.
The entire thing was captured on a total
of 27 different cameras, all from different angles.
According to the production company,
though a parachute did open to slow down the car
from its free fall,
the sedan did in fact manage
to scrape against a tree scratching the paint a little bit.
But that was it.
Otherwise the vehicle was surprisingly undamaged.
Number four are The Giant Dice.
With many super popular online casinos
and gambling websites already holding a big chunk
of the market.
It takes a big move for a new company
to get in on that action.
And what bigger move could there possibly be
than the world's largest dice rolling down the side
of a mountain.
Well, that's exactly what the marketing team behind
Gnuf.com thought when they built a pair of two metre tall,
half ton solid steel dice
and dropped them onto a snowy mountain
in Nuuk, Greenland.
In order to drop these dice,
the team had to acquire a helicopter that was designed
to handle extreme conditions,
including ridiculously cold temperatures
and the wind that you would expect
to feel when hovering above a mountain.
The publicity stunt took place in mid December of 2007.
People could actually watch these giant dice roll on
their side and even bet on the outcome
which was revealed on October 2007 to be both ones.
Snake eyes.
Now that is definitely a cool way to launch your website.
Number five is The Giant Popsicle.
Obviously the marketing genius
who thought up this next publicity stunt was not aware
that ice, you know melts.
To promote their new drink flavor, Kiwi Strawberry,
Snapple attempted to break a Guinness World Record
by creating the largest popsicle ever
and having it stand up for everybody to gawk at.
But you might be wondering what's the problem with
that big idea?
Well they tried this in Union Square
in New York City on June 21, 2005.
The first day of the summer season at high noon
when the warm sun's rays were ready to destroy any ice
that it could find.
Clearly this wasn't going to end well
but Snapple's team pressed on.
As you have likely predicted by now,
the 17 and a half ton popsicle that they attempted
to lift by crane became a 17 and a half ton river
of slushy pink Snapple sludge
that literally had people running to escape it.
Police actually had to close off streets,
and even firefighters showed up to help deal
with the flow of sticky pink water
that made its way down East 17th street.
Number six is The Trainwreck.
Not only have publicity stunts been around for centuries,
they've been going wrong for just about the same amount
of time.
If you're looking for a good example
then look no further than the little train wreck
of a stunt that took place on September 15, 1896,
when William Crush decided the best way
to get his company's name into peoples minds was
to stage a huge spectacle.
Specifically and accident involving two full sized trains.
Crush actually built his own small town for the event
which he appropriately called Crush Texas
with circus tents and hand dug wells.
William invited tens of thousands of people to come
and witness this ridiculous display
and unbelievably over 40,000 witnesses showed up.
Believe it or not,
this actually made Crush the second largest city in Texas
for only that one day.
However sadly the spectacle went horribly wrong
when the two trains that crashed head on into each other,
had their engine's boilers explode
and that wasn't good.
Multiple people were injured
and even a few lost their lives.
William Crush was quickly fired
from his railway job over the stunt.
Number seven is The Bomb Scare.
It's one thing to say that your marketing campaign bombed
but it's another to use an actual bomb.
On April 28, 2006,
the promotion team behind the mega star
Tom Cruise's new movie Mission Impossible III,
created what they felt would be a unique marketing campaign.
They decided to put red boxes
with wires protruding from them
in coin operated newspaper dispensers
all around Los Angeles.
These boxes would play the movies theme song
when the stand's door was opened,
leading the newspaper purchaser to believe
that they were part of some big action bomb defusing scene.
See, these music boxes looked very much like actual bombs.
So much so that it caused a little teeny tiny panic.
No, it was a big panic.
Police were notified en masse
about these suspicious packages inside newspaper stands
and took action, actually calling in the bomb squad.
The bomb squad even detonated some of their
own explosives to destroy some of the stands out of safety.
Number eight is the natural beauty campaign.
More often than not,
when a company advertises their products or services,
they use super thin models,
many of which are already huge Hollywood celebrities
or mega fashion runway icons,
however in an attempt to change the way
that the world sees advertising
and potentially beauty itself, Dove,
a personal care brand owned by Unilever,
launched a giant ad campaign that included print ads,
commercials, online video, workshops
and much more that showed off their brand
in a daring new way.
Instead of choosing supermodels,
the company chose ordinary women with natural curves
of all body sizes.
Company representatives and publicists explained
that Dove's idea was to show everyone
how naturally beautiful every woman is.
The inspiring campaign that showed
that everybody can be confident
and comfortable in their own skin was a huge success.
In fact, Dove saw their sales rocket 700%.
Number nine is The Bubble Wrapped Street.
If you knew someone that you cared about
that was accident prone,
you would likely do your best
to keep them as safe as possible. Right?
Well it turns out that the people over at Confused.com,
a car insurance comparison website,
have a similar thought process
but they went a little extreme with it.
They decided to go to work trying to make some people
that were accident prone feel a bit safer.
On January 27, 2010,
the company's marketing team launched a campaign
in a big way,
when they covered nearly everything in
Somerville Road in Worchester, UK in bubble wrap all
to raise awareness of safe driving for the winter months.
Everything from the outside of houses to trees
and bushes to fire hydrants
and even doghouses got the bubble wrap treatment.
The company chose that street in particular
as they discovered that the homes on
that street generated the largest number
of accident claims in all of the United Kingdom.
It took eight men over twelve hours
to pull off the publicity stunt
and they used over 1500 square meters
of bubble wrap just to do it.
And number ten is the voluntary blackout.
We end this list with a very important publicity stunt
that continues annually to this day
that you've probably heard of.
Earth Hour.
To help keep the awareness of being eco-friendly
in our minds, and to help the Earth itself out a little bit,
a PR stunt was created by the
World Wide Fund for Nature itself.
On March 31, 2007,
between the hours of 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. local time,
in Sydney, Australia,
2.2 million people took part in an endeavour
which saw them turning off all
of their non-essential lights and electronics.
By 2008, the entire world had taken notice
and today over 50 million people take part.
In order to draw further awareness to the global impact
that climate change has on our planet,
even famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower,
Golden Gate Bridge and Buckingham Palace get
in on the voluntary blackout every year.
But I want to know from you guys in the comments.
Which publicity stunt on this list was the craziest
or more dangerous or is the one
that I might have missed
that you have heard about in the past?
But as always, thank you guys so much for watching.
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Bye.
(imitates whale)