Chocolate celebrity heads named ‘best PR campaign’ for Darrell Lea with first-day reach of 33m
Hughes, Preston, Stefanovic
A PR campaign for Darrell Lea featuring the carving and auction of life-size chocolate heads of TV celebrities Dave Hughes, Karl Stefanovic and Matt Preston has achieved a first-day reach of over 33 million, according to PR company DEC Public Relations.
The campaign, launched around Father’s Day, is to raise awareness and funds for the chocolate company’s chosen charity, the Save The Bilby Fund.
The heads are listed on eBay for auction and at time of publishing had only one bid. The proceeds will go to the fund when the auction ends following Save The Bilby Day on September 11.
The campaign was unveiled on Friday on the Today Show, which is hosted by Stefanovic, and has generated “widespread national media pick-up, including Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, Courier Mail, Perth Now, News.com and mX Sydney,” according to DEC Public Relations who handled the campaign.
The 33 million figure is based on “the cumulative readership/viewer figures of the media coverage achieved on Friday,” a spokesperson told Mumbrella.
Scott Rylands, head of retail, marketing and innovations at Darrell Lea said: “For more than a decade we’ve been supporting the Save the Bilby Fund with sales of chocolate bilbies, raising more than $400,000. This is by far our most successful PR campaign, achieving the largest reach in a very short time period, and generating outstanding awareness of our CSR endeavours during a crucial sales period.”
For a population of 22 million in Australia, this is indeed an outstanding result. Again a PR company quoting absolute shite – does nothing for the PR industry
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Nice concept but 33m… surly not unique’s or did Australia’s population grow over night?
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33 million in one day – that spokesperson is worth a gazillion dollars!
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33 million reach and only one bid at the time of printing….I’m not sure that’s a success in anyone’s book is it? And who would want to eat anything that looked like karl stefanovic anyway…
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33 Million?? Cume Reach??
I think this PR person needs to go back to schoole and learn some basic media 101
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It must be a typo!
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zeffed i think you’re confusing a low cost PR campaign aimed at increasing awareness of the charity with direct response advertising. No doubt if they’d had millions to spend with a media buy they would have taken a different approach. As it was they needed an idea that would appeal to editorial.
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No wonder every man, woman, and child in Australia read/viewed this story 1.5 times!
(Or one in ten of us read/viewed it 15 times)
That sculptor is the fastest artisan I’ve ever seen!!!
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Only just reached me..
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Apparently the Karl Stefanovic chocolate head has been doing the Today show for the past week… and no one has been able to tell the difference
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Was the quote ”the cumulative readership/viewer figures of the media coverage achieved on Friday,” lost on you three?
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more hypo than typo Alex
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I must’ve been the only person in Australia not to see this.
33 Million. PLEASE
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Tim, you aren’t a bright one are you. You can’t add up all the readership / audience figures by different media – this makes the assumption that each person is unique. It would have been easier to write 33 million impacts as opposed to a reach of 33 million.
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have to agree with zeffd, only 1 bid from all that exposure means that it produced something like 0.00000303% success in producing bids. I know it doesnt work like that, but just saying… on another note, if it wasnt for Mumbrella i wouldnt have known about this campaign, so i guess i dont make the cut of 33 million people
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Paul, a bit rough on Tim. He quotes the source multiple times. The figure obviously came from DEC- and he’s even questioned where that came from.
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Hi Paul,
Reach – the unduplicated percentage or ‘000s of a potential audience exposed one or more times during a given period.
If the media release reads “has achieved a first-day reach of over 33 million, according to PR company DEC Public Relations”, then they are effectively saying 33 million unique people were impacted that day.
Total impacts = Reach x Average Frequency. Assuming the media release is correct and it delivered a one day reach of 33 million, then we would expect the total impacts to be significantly higher than the 33 million quoted given duplication.
My best guess is that this campaign got nowhere near 33 million impacts or reach last Friday!
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Furthermore, how many of the claimed 33 million gross impacts were meaningful? PR Companies have a nasty habit of quoting vague opportunities to see or hear as an impact. If a media planner made a ridiculous claim like this a half smart client would shoot them down in flames.
Sadly, it seems, some clients still swallow this meaningless tripe!
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It’s tuesday afternoon and i’ve only just heard of this. Also just checked ebay and it still sits at 1 bid, on one item (hughesy) dare i say it could be hughesy bidding? Great idea, but the execution may have failed somewhat…
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And the chocolates don’t look very much like the people they’re supposed to be – except that the middle one does appear to be carrying a bit of condition. Glad they have captions or I’d have no idea of what I’m not going to be bidding on (and isn’t PR just full of it – shite, not chocolate).
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Hmmm I must stop living under that rock as this campaign has only just reached me and as a PR I do try to keep up with current news.
If it was my campaign I’d be reviewing why there is only one bid instead of counting audience impressions (or whatever the hell they were counting – sheep maybe). Then I’d be trying to do something to get those bids up while also explaining to the client why it’s not been successful.
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HI Anon – I wasn’t speaking to Tim from mumbrella…but the tim in the comment section. Tim – from mumbrella – my sincere apologies if you were offended
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Was the ROI calculator also made of chocolate?
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That chocolate head does not look anything like that swaggering, alcohol consuming, smarmy… “Karl bloke!”
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It is so typical of advertising people to bag out a success story by a PR firm.
Yes I agree the 33 million audience figure is a bit silly, but you can’t deny that this activity had a great deal of coverage at what would have been a very low budget in comparison to what they would have had to spend on advertising.
For a reach of that figure, they would have had blanket coverage of a number of major news outlets, a great result, especially when doing PR for a consumer product which is substantially more difficult to do because of it’s commercial nature.
Considering his is an industry publication, maybe we should be also taking the time to say well done to the company involved – but maybe be a bit more conservative with your figures.
Nigel – to bag out PR companies in general for quoting media mentions is utterly stupid. Advertising does the same by quoting audience reach figures when we all know that the majority flick past an advertisement in a newspaper, or use ad breaks as the perfect time to get a cup of tea.
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Dave, perhaps it’s getting bagged because perhaps it’s not a success. One bid and a rubbish first day reach, even in shonky PR terms surely can’t be seen as a success.
33 million? Please. Today show rates what, 350,000 if we’re being generous? Daily Telegraphy has a readership of 1 million, the Herald Sun about 1.4m (again being generous)…Courier is about 600k plus a few extra for the other sites.
Given that, they’d struggle to justify 3 million.
Nice idea sure, but let’s no kid ourselves here shall we? And if you’re going to, don’t PR it.
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They could have found a half-decent sculptor…
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Thanks for all your interesting comments. The eBay auction went live on Monday evening and is running for one week, in the run up to National Save the Bilby Day on Sunday. Many eBay bidders hold off until the last 24 hours to start bidding, so we disagree that this is a reflection on the success of the campaign.
As for this campaign’s editorial reach – it has been excellent. To reiterate, this reach has been calculated on the cumulative readership/viewer figures of the media coverage achieved – many individuals consume more than one media outlet a day and we’re not claiming these are unique views. The number was calculated using the official audited figures of the media outlets engaged — News.com.au, for example, claims a unique audience of over 5.5m. The PR industry is moving away from using AVEs, and ‘Reach’ is one of the recommended measurements from the ‘Value Metrics’ guidelines developed by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communications. We’d also like to point out that reach is just one of several metrics which will be used to evaluate the campaign.
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DEC – Cudos for responding, but the 5.5m just inflames it for me. On that logic, you’re talking potential audience – not actual. How about you get the impressions from the actual story on news.com.au and let us know what the actual reach is.
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444 views on YouTube – WOW – It’s a hit ! 🙂
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And that ladies and gentleman proves that 77.5% of stats are made up…
Of the 444 YouTube views how many people watched the entire vid, start to finish…?
Charlie bit my finger – now that’s got views…
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It’s unfortunate that they have referenced ‘readership’ which is not industry standard. Circ (which is usually about 1/3 of readership) is a fair measure, as acknowledged by PRIA.
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Nigel’s comment made me laugh – “If a media planner made a ridiculous claim like this a half smart client would shoot them down in flames”.
Paid media claims are far more odious than this stupid mistake because they’re better concealed. Media stats are one of the greatest cons perpetuated on the busienss community. They never discount potential reach for all those people who toss the paper, glaze over the TV ads or blank out online display.
And of course the big difference is that the advertiser is paying millions for the privilege of being deceived while the purportedly independent media buyer is enjoying weekend spa junkets paid for by the media owners.
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You are all missing an important point. This project was designed to help raise awareness of Darrell Lea support of Save the Bilby Fund. Right or wrong, finally we have a new idea growing and hopefully reaching some in the community that don’t just base success on statistics. Think about some different goals and there can be wins for a small furry animal facing extinction in Australia.
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Hi My name is Frank Manthey I am a co=founder of save the bilby fund I was delighted to learn that Karl Dave and Matt aggreed to have the heads sculptured in a block of Darrell Lea chocolate to help save this very long term Australian called a Bilby, the bilby has never received so much coverage thanks to this campaign, who cares how many people have seen the project all that matters is the bilby is the winner I would like to thank everyone who has made a comment I invite you all to visit our web site and join with me to see if we can try and save this animal from extinction, and thank you uMbRELLA for giving me the chance to THANK to you all.
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