I have just stumbled across this brilliant PR Stunt video on the Two Four Seven blog which I thought was rather clever and well executed. The PR team and agency of Irish bookmaker Paddy Power managed to ambush The Ryder Cup by posting the world’s first ever ‘sky tweets’. It is basically a guerrilla marketing campaign that was designed to encourage people to share their messages of support to our golfers from #TeamEurope.

Never one to shy away from a risky campaign Paddy Power’s team hired five stunt planes to fly at 10,000ft above the golf course to tweet the top 60 specially selected tweets which supported the European team and even poked fun at the US guys. Good job there was some moderation as I feel one particular US golfer could have received an interesting tweet or two.

I will let Julio explain:

Some of the tweets, which were visible from more than 20 miles away, included ‘Spirit of Seve’, ‘Rory’s Gonna Getcha’ and ‘Mrs Dufner is Hot’ in reference to the wife of US player Jason Dufner.  Tiger Woods didn’t get away with tweets asking ‘Seen Tiger?’

The cheeky campaign was led by Paddy Power’s own twitter handle (@PaddyPower) and asked followers to use the not-official #GoEurope hashtag.

You know how I love to analyse campaigns so I gave the #GoEurope hashtag a quick run through my magic box of tricks and it seems the campaign really did capture the imagination with a reach of more than 74million on Twitter. The campaign wasn’t tweeted by anyone of high influence but there were a lot of mentions and let’s not forget that Rory is videoed talking about it as he sees a personal tweet to him. According to my stats there were more than 79,000 mentions. The video of Paddy explaining the campaign has received more than 1,200 views but I am sure that will go up as more people hear about it.

I love the fact Paddy Power allows its team to take risks with their PR and they are happy to invest in a strong idea, Kudos go to the PR company for a great idea and it looked stunning. I have no idea on the cost of this stunt but I can imagine it wasn’t cheap but the results are impressive and if was online conversation they wanted and simply to get the brand noticed they certainly achieved that. Well done guys!

I should also give a hat tip to Mark Jackson for initally highlighting this story to me – thanks buddy.

About Chris Norton

Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.