PR stunt exposed as being nothing more than a PR stunt
Investigative journalism from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph today, which exposes that a visit to Bondi Beach by the actor Zac Efron was just a publicity stunt.
Apparently when it was announced that there’d be a photocall of Efron giving a surfing lesson, the paper’s columnist Annette Sharp expected that she’d get a lesson.
Sadly she failed to get near him and certainly failed to be photographed with him. She dedicates most of page 3 to explaining why it wasn’t her fault. It beats “the dog ate my homework”.
Happily she still managed to namecheck the sponsor twice.
I could almost hear her stamping her feet and crying, how incredibly pathetic. And such poor writing. How do these people get jobs?
it’s written tongue in cheek, Jay, and is the journo’s angle on what otherwise is a non-story. she knows the readers still want to be fed something on Efron and the bondi visit
Well, if that’s the angle, fine. But I don’t think it was overly successful in that attempt either… Seems like a poor effort from whichever way you look at it, in my personal opinion.
It’s Efron! She went, spent time there, that was the big celeb story of the day, no other stories to replace it… She had no choice but to write something.
The way she tackled it revealed that ultimately, Efron and Co didn’t care about much else but themselves, their committments empty and relationships one sided. Made me think that he and his sponsors are a bunch of tossers. If they just wanted a pic in the paper, with no engagement or interaction with media or fans – why didn’t they take out an ad?
I’m sure every journo there knew it was all a publicity stunt. So does the audience when the read or see the story, they’re not dumb. But at the end of the day, if you put in a release, that Efron is going to give a surf lesson, then he better give a surf lesson.
If he is going to do nothing else but pose in his O-gly glasses, that’s fine too, media will still send photographers – just be bloody honest about what they can expect!
I thought the article was funny, the PR stunt was lame.
If you had watched the Daily Terror’s video footage you would see she did get near him, she interviewed him. Chill out and take it for the ‘tongue in cheek’ piece it was. It was Sydney Confidential remember!
Love the Onion-esque headline.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…..
Maybe I’m just not in the target audience, but the Oakley brand seems a bit tired. Stunts like this do not help at all either.