Publicity Stunts Still Earn Attentionby Marcia Yudkin
Who says publicity stunts are passé? Outrageous staged events designed solely to show up on
evening news still get job done when they're clever and fun.
Stan Heimowitz, owner of Celebrity Gems in Castro Valley, California, not long ago successfully dramatized in streets of San Francisco fact that IntraLinux, a small software company -- Heimowitz's client -- is challenging Microsoft, industry giant.
Outside Moscone Center in San Francisco, where Microsoft was launching its new product Windows 2000, a Bill Gates look-alike was matched against a Penguin (IntraLinux's mascot) in a boxing ring whose four corners were held up by Penguinettes. The Penguin pinned Gates, naturally, while a plane towing a banner that read "IntraLinux" flew overhead.
This creative bit of street theater made its point to onlookers and media alike.
Publicity stunts go back at least to days of showman P.T. Barnum, who announced his circus' arrival in town by hitching an elephant to a plow beside train tracks. This raised such a ruckus that it's still against law in some states to plow a field with an elephant.
Suspense became an element in a stunt featured on front page of Los Angeles Times in 1980 when paper challenged Bob Allen to make good on his boast that he could be dropped into any city with $100 and 72 hours later own several properties without paying down payments. While readers wondered if Allen could really do it, author of Nothing Down indeed pulled it off.
Attention-getting can go high-brow too, as when actor Norman George, who portrays Edgar Allen Poe in a one-man show, persuaded city of Boston to rename Carver Street, where creator of "The Raven" was born, for poet in connection with 180th anniversary of Poe's birth in 1989.
