#LuckyUnderwear

Cheltenham Festival March 2013 | Paddy Power Lucky Pants

Paddy Power and their pair of giant lucky green briefs left spectators speechless. They sure know how to add a bit of fun and mischief to the Cheltenham festival.

The large pair of lucky underwear was afloat for a couple minutes before being put down. The Cheltenham Festival organisers demanded Paddy Power to deflate their giant green pants shaped hot air balloon.

The lucky underwear was clearly a crowd pleaser and didn’t intervene with races or the spectators. The Air balloon was designed to give fans an opportunity to watch the race from above, giving them the best seats in the house.

The blimp is 63 foot high and 60 foot wide, clearly visible to the crowd at Cheltenham. The float is made from more than 3,600 square foot of material.  The lucky underwear has a huge waistband of 2,260 inches.  It took six months to construct and make the giant underwear airworthy. The blimp was used in Cheltenham to promote the Paddy Power brand.

But this was not the only time we heard from Paddy Powers lucky green pants.

Nicklas Bendtner sporting Paddy Power lucky underwear

After scoring a goal for Denmark in the Euros 2012 he celebrated by flashing a pair of Paddy Power underwear. In front of thousands of supporters revealing his pair Paddy Power branded underwear. This caught wind very fast making Nicklas Bendtner pair of underwear a popular topic on twitter. Twitter is now a vocal point for any event that makes headlines. People are able to express their opinions online. If a well-known celebrity makes a mistake it will usually be discussed online. Technology and social networking has made celebrity life less private.

The Euros is a multinational football event, and it is watched by thousands of supporters. Nicklas Bendtner celebrated in front of the cameras after scoring a goal against Portugal. Denmark ended up losing 2-3 to Portugal. The match didn’t make headlines because of how well Portugal played, but instead the topic of discussion was about Nicklas Bendtner revealing his Paddy Power boxers.

Nicklas Bendtner claims that he didn’t know that he was breaching any rules and he just happened to be wearing his “lucky boxers” at the time, claiming that he’s been wearing the Paddy Power branded underwear for a while.

 The stunt was a breach of UEFA rules when it came to ambush marketing, and he did upset his bosses, since Denmark football association is sponsored by Ladbrokes who are Paddy Powers rivals.

David Bendtner was fined £80,000, lucky for him the generous people at Paddy Power decided to pay his fine, as they claimed it was what the fans want. Messages via social media suggested they should pay the fine. Paddy Power couldn’t be any happier, as this has become a popular topic on twitter. Paddy Power was able to promote their brand to a wider audience thanks to Nicklas Bendtner.

Link to the twitter topic https://twitter.com/search?q=paddy%20power%20underwear&src=typd

#NotLikeTheMovies

 

As the world becomes increasingly saturated in digital and online methods of both connecting and understanding, a new and innovative array of channels have opened up that maximise the impact of PR communications. With the arrival of Twitter and other forms of social media, content can be streamed and processed faster than ever before. Items of interest now have the ability to transcend the reaches of traditional media channels. As a result of this, we have ‘viral’ images and videos, which can not only be used to entertain, but can also serve the purpose of driving home a political, social or moral issue which people relate to and invest in, such as the Kony campaign which spread like wildfire throughout social platforms in 2012. 

The film industry utilises the idea of PR for promotion to great effect. By setting up dedicated accounts for their films, and releasing a variety of trivia, trailers and release dates, they are able to draw in fans and keep them updated with current information and generate a large amount of interest prior to the film being released, therefore generating as much hype and profit as possible. So with nothing to stunt the public’s access to information regarding their anticipated releases, the PR campaign for film has undeniably become an easier task. 

However press offices are always looking for new and diverse ways in order to maximise the image and publicity of their films or their respective clients. The concept of celebrity PR relationships emerges from the public’s growing interest in every aspect of the lives of stars. Specifically, a large amount of interest is garnered by the love lives of various stars. By persuading usually the two female and male leads of a film to purport to be in a real relationship, detached from the synthetic world of the film, fans are offered the opportunity to emotionally invest further into the franchise. 

The relationship of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson from the Twilight series is a good example of this. The relationship was initiated around the time the first film in the franchise was released. Their relationship peaked, and fans were able to connect with them, or Bella and Edward, away from the films through magazines such as OK, Star and Heat, providing priceless PR for the series. As the series began to wind down, their relationship hit rock bottom with the revelation that Kristen was cheating with British director Rupert Sanders. This revelation perfectly coincided after the release of the final film, as the relationship now had no selling point with regards to the franchise. The films had stopped, and inevitably with it was the magic of K-Stew and R-Patz.

#FromHarlemToKorea

#FromHarlemToKorea: The world has gone viral!

By Theodora Manyika, P11251409

Six months ago the words “Do the Harlem Shake!” would have evoked nothing more than a raised brow. If you hear that sentence nowadays, you better get your camera out! Of course, that is the idea of trends in the first place, but in the past it took a lot more time and effort for a trend to become internationally recognized. We live in the age of participatory culture and people become global stars in the blink of an eye. Although now officially dead, because of the surplus of attention they received, the best recent examples of the power of viral culture are Gangnam Style and Harlem Shake.

“It’s a Gangnam Style world and we are all living in it.” – Josh Groban

What measures success of a PR campaign? Is it the likes it has gotten on Facebook, the re-tweets, the Youtube views or maybe the word of mouth? No. You know your campaign has succeeded when an aloof, distanced place like North Korea makes a parody of it. Because that’s exactly what happened with Gangnam Style. It got so internationally recognized that even North Korea, in which the access to Internet is highly restricted, caught on with the trend.

Gangnam Style is probably one of the most successful PR campaigns for the last couple of years. And yes, don’t be fooled – Gangnam Style is a well thought campaign that took a lot of planning and effort. Behind Gangnam Style and PSY is YG Entertainment - a famous in its country South Korean P-Pop label.  But instead of going on with the strategies behind this campaign, which are, without any doubt, very well thought out, I will outline this – PSY is perhaps the only Korean politically engaged activist that you and I can name.

Surprised? Behind the catchy tune and crazy dance there is actually a message- PSY ridicules Korea’s class stratification and the impossibly rich lifestyle that the “Gangnam boys” lead. So apart from creating an extremely successful campaign, making an enormous amount of profit and making people all around the world ride invisible horses, Gangnam has also risen the awareness about social problems from across the globe and an interest in a radically different culture (and who knows, maybe tourism levels have risen too!) “It’s a Gangnam world and we are all living in it”, indeed.

Harlem Shake – “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”

As for Harlem Shake - this is a trend that has more than 8 million re-tweets. To envision how many re-tweets that is, imagine a small country, and every man, woman, baby, granddad and grandmother with a phone in their hand, re-tweeting. Yes, you get the idea.

Harlem Shake’s success, unlike Gangnam Style is based entirely on luck, or rather, on participatory culture. It became famous after a group of Australian students uploaded their video doing the famous “shake” and the rest, as they say is history – 50, 000 different remakes of it, featuring people in their offices, the Norwegian army, various fundraising organizations and British singer Ed Sheeran. Oh, and let’s not forget the thousands of flashmobs, of course.  The track was recorded nearly a year before it went viral, not to mention that it was entirely sampled, so its popularity is not due to originality. Hence, some might say its success is simply luck. Yet, the key to viral culture is somewhere else.

  Harlem Shake might not have a political message to shout out. It also doesn’t have any powerful corporation behind it. Nevertheless, Harlem Shake teaches an important core lesson about the essential thing to make a trend viral – engagement with the audience. Let people engage with your trend on a personal level and give them the ability to reshape it the way they want to.

 In conclusion, two very important lessons can be learnt from Gangnam and     Harlem Shake about making something viral. First, it must be unusual and novel. And second, everyone must be invited to the party.

A detailed PR report on Gangnam style is available from: http://www.10yetis.co.uk/how-gangnam-style-went-viral.html

A few more lessons on viral from Harlem Shake by Social Media Today: http://socialmediatoday.com/cbm23/1300886/viral-video-how-to-harlem-shake-guide