No matter how much the Hollywood rich and famous have tried to re-brand Tinseltown by telling us who to vote for and how we should live our lives, it was interesting to see the 89th Academy Awards fiasco only served to highlight the silver screen glitter that is Hollywood – and barely touched the probity and professionalism of accounting consultancy firm PwC.

No lasting damage for brand PwC, just a few tongue-in-cheek news stories and opinion pieces – and some great publicity! Brand PwC still intact – if not a little more human – Hollywood is still brand Tinseltown – shiny and skin deep.

The event did however afford ample opportunities for hijacking. Here is our selection of some of the best.

The optician chain Specsavers once again saw an opportunity with their popular strapline “should have gone to Specsavers”…

The mix up gave the Miss Universe organization the opportunity to pass on the award for the biggest live-TV mishap. After wrongly crowing the 2015 winner a similar confusion to Oscarsgate ensued, with the coronation of the wrong winner taking place only for the unsuspecting Miss Columbia to have her crown ripped away just minutes later. Miss Universe saw the opportunity for a bit of fun and took to Twitter.

Lastly is my personal favourite. Nice work to a Cinema who pulled one over on their customers by playing the start of La La Land at the start of a Moonlight screening. Not only did this move give everyone a good laugh but it also got this local not-for-profit cinema loads of free publicity.

February isn’t just awards season in the Film industry. Here at IBA we’ve been entering clients for various awards showing off the great work they’ve done in the past year – fingers crossed for all of them. One has used its analytics data base to help shape the UK Government’s upcoming whiplash legislation – a positive contribution we’ve used to craft entries for them for several major industry awards that we are sure will have positive impact on their brand.

And in the US, we again have shown our client that news release coverage is more than a simple wire pick-up. We used an appointment story of a new Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel for our payments processing client in what is a highly-regulated industry to secure tier one placements and a key interview in a top US law publication.

If you’d like to read more on how to pull off the perfect hot topic heist check out this previous Level Pitcher blog.

Judith Ingleton-Beer is CEO at IBA International.

Tags: pr social media
16 Mar 2017
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