The Boy In the Balloon: Or What Lengths People Will Go to for Publicity

I am sure you have been following the “boy in the balloon” news story and all the hype, drama and craziness surrounding it.  Now, I am not going to weigh in on whether it was a hoax or if it was really just a desperate ploy to get a television show, but it does bring up an interesting point:

And that is: If the only way to sell anything these days is to generate publicity, how far is too far in trying to generate your own publicity?

Because to be fair, if indeed the parents staged the whole escapade to generate publicity to sell a tv show,  they are correct in understanding how hard it is to sell anything these days and the only way to do so is to generate a lot of “buzz.”

In fact, if you study the past 12 months of what has been selling in the book, tv or film arenas — almost everything is based off something that generated a lot of publicity.  Take one recent example — my friend Andrea Wachner.

Andrea hired a stripper to pose as herself at her 10-year-high school reunion.  She filmed the experiment,  edited it into a 40-minute documentary, and posted a trailer on Youtube.  Suddenly the trailer was spreading virally and the press ate it up. She appeared on news outlets everywhere and now has an agent, a manager and is shopping a movie script, reality series and more.

Another example is our own client Spencer Walker and his blog cooktobang.com. Spencer started this blog for fun and suddenly audiences around the world found it and were posting their own success stories due to his recipes.  He started getting incoming calls from media outlets (Cosmopolitan, Playboy, etc.) and we ended up selling his book to St. Martin’s Press and it will be coming out in May.  More importantly, because of all this press, studios and networks have been interested in developing a movie or a tv show based on his site.

Clearly publicity can help or hurt you. My own opinion is that you have to be honest with your audience and you can’t come off as contriving anything –  audiences are just  too smart to lie to. You have to believe in your product and push as much as you can (by designing a great site or telling all your friends and using social media to help you) AND THEN you have to let viral word of mouth do its work for you.

You must let the process unfold naturally — you can’t just make it happen by lies and false pretenses.  But if you are patient and do it correctly, you could reap the rewards.