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Ten Ways to Come Up With a Creative Idea For an Explosive Promo Event

I love the creative process. I do what I do out of pure enjoyment. Hopefully, nobody does it better. There’s a beauty to making a great deal. It’s my canvas. And I like painting it.8

Donald Trump

I’m a painter. Media is my canvas and ideas are my paints. Some works were done for a mass audience and some only for connoisseurs. To produce better work, you should continue painting, being creative, and implementing ideas.

A good idea means a more than halfway successful explosive PR campaign.

News must evoke the desire to print and reprint it, press a “like” button near it, and repost it. I’ll explain in this article how to make this type of news.

1. “Dictionary Divination.” This method was invented by a well-known PR man from St. Petersburg, Anton Vuima, the author of Black PR.

Here’s the gist of his method. You keep the business you’re promoting in your mind. You take a dictionary of the Russian language, open it to any page, and point your finger at a random word. Whatever it is, your task is to align it with your client and invent a promo action. The case study where a watch worth 200,000 euro was drowned in the Neva is described by Anton in the following video at the end of the third minute.9

How does this work? I don’t know, but it does. This is possibly the psyche or help from Heaven, I can’t tell you for sure. But it works like it worked for the detective from Twin Peaks. Do you remember him guessing suspects, setting up bottles, and flinging stones at them? When his guess was correct, a stone would break the glass. He didn’t know how it worked, but it did. Does it really matter how? Just use it.

2. Thinking in Paradoxes. Coming up with paradoxes means inventing centaurs, that is aligning two seemingly and fundamentally incompatible things – like a man with the body of a horse. As the saying goes, “When a dog bites a man, it’s not news, but when a man bites a dog – that’s a sensation.” Or a man went hunting with his dog and was attacked by… a dog. You’ll be laughing, but that was real news somewhere in Europe.

Think of someone for whom you’ll never be able to provide your services, or of the product you would not sell to anybody under no circumstances.

What client would make you laugh at his/her oddity? When you have the answers to these questions or remember something from your real life and smile, you are on the right path.

One example: we were boosting a coupon web site. What cannot be sold at a discount? We were racking our brain and then came up with the answer: indulgences! That was how we came out with the action: “Selling indulgences at a discount: the bid is valid till Doomsday.” The outcome: 10 TV reports and a 10-fold increase in the website traffic during the week. “… till Doomsday” – that deadline was not picked accidentally but in full compliance with point 3: Agenda.

3. Agenda (How Newsjacking Works for You and Your Business). Your task is hooking events of the day to your business using the following algorithm: look up the sources (YandexNews, Twitter Trends, Mediametrics top news, the main page of LiveJournal), choose what is relevant for your business, and then dovetail. If you come up with a centaur, great!

Case study. We promoted a translation agency at the Student Games in Kazan. The idea was for a youthful translator to declare her love in 68 languages… but for whom? The action was ready, it remained to find a heartthrob. We looked through news the day before and saw that an athlete from Uganda had been administered to the hospital with malaria. That was our hero! If the news were about a female athlete, our action would have a lesbian skew. Well, someone was lucky enough to get limelight on Channel 1 after a report in Life¹⁰, in addition to a multitude of publications on the Internet.

4. TIPS-Thinking (“TRIZ”). I am not a TIPS-savvy person. I just visited one workshop and read the books of Altshuller, Anatoly Grin, and Sergey Faer. This was more than enough for me to understand: “The more you know about the problem specification, the clearer its solution is.”

When you properly formulate the problem, you already find more than a half of solution. One day, a large retail chain suffered from info bullying: a certain unidentified citizen complained to the media that he poisoned himself with a food product that should not have stayed on the shelf. He preferred anonymity and introduced himself on behalf of an organization that did not confirm his membership. Yet his photos and persona were chewed over by many leading media outlets. How to get rid of the blemish? We considered several responses, but then it dawned on us that since the blow was anonymous, so should the counterblow. In the upshot, a repentance letter was sent where the same person confessed he had concocted the whole thing for the sake of “cheap fame.” Several hours later, the news hit the top YandexNews.10

I learned one more thing at the TIPS workshop. Unless you know how to deal with competition, do the opposite. It is by following this advice of Sergey Faer that a girl won the Mayoral election in a Turkish city.

Or here is another story. One of the Russian cities was shattered by social unrest. Later, public meetings were banned, but the problem remained. Then dolls and toys were out at the meeting.

@ ivan krupchik

There was a meeting without any gathering of people, with just picket signs in view. One could draw inspiration from looking at this lovely outrage.11

TIPS is a very useful, multifaceted methodology for creativity with huge potential of addressing various issues – from household and social to public and industrial – hidden inside12. Made in Russia by Genrikh S. Altshuller.

5. Chinese Whispers and Slips of the Tongue. On one occasion, I consulted video producer Den Pe regarding the promo event “a nude girl at the steering wheel”. Because of poor liaison, we had the following conversation:

– Den, what’s your opinion about the action “nude girl at the steering wheel of a car-sharing service?”

– Who’s at the steering wheel… of what?

– Nude girl! Car-sharing!

– Nude traffic cop?

– What kind of nude traffic cop? I am talking about a nude girl, car-sharing. Isn’t it cool?

– No, a nude traffic cop is cooler.

– And how can I do it??

– Think for yourself.

And I thought of something. The promo event cracked TOP-5 Yandex news for Moscow.

6. “Thanks, Stand-up!” Gag-men and stand-up comedians tighten up their jokes, bringing trivial facts to absolute paradox. This is exactly what we need! Comedians also like applying unusual circumstances to usual goods (A supermarket cashier has such an overbearing voice that everyone would take a bag).

Gag-men often invent non-existent goods (detachable arm with a manicured finger, sandy ass, feet in champagne, or Bentley’s steering wheel – goods for those who would like to upload good photos in Instagram). In case of explosive PR, such goods are invented not to sell, but to hit the headlines (indulgences at a discount, a coupon for life with a millionaire, and more).

So just type the name of your product or sphere of business in YouTube and then use such words as humor, stand-up, comedy, and you’ll have some good ideas. Just don’t forget to thank a standup comedian!

7. Associations. I described this method in my Boosting a Super Company long ago and have been applying it successfully since 2006. I was then promoting a simultaneous translation bureau. Looking for associations, such as what else could be simultaneous or synchronized, I hit upon synchronized swimming.

As a result, Olympic champions in synchronized swimming became the honored clients of the translation agency Synchronist.13

8. Maslennikov’s Matrix Help You Create More Than 200 Crazy Ideas. This method is about dividing a sheet of paper into two columns. You write interesting objects in one – celeb, politician, transvestite, porn star, strip dancer, etc., while in another column you describe some shocking actions: burnt, killed, raped, brawled, stepped in a cake, etc. Then, randomly match words from the first and second columns, fitting your business into the scheme.

After sorting out 10—20 various combos, one will strike you and journalists to the marrow.