15 examples of great online PR – Insight Blog

As a digital PR & social agency, we love to keep on top of what’s going on in the world and praise other agencies and in-house teams for their fantastic PR & social efforts, as we so often get from others.

PR and marketing is crucial for businesses to increase brand awareness, boost SEO, build trust and sell their products and services. We can all recall at least one example of a great online PR campaign and we decided to put our brains together to celebrate some of the best online PR campaigns OF ALL TIME (or at least since the emergence of the world wide web).

So get stuck in and feel free to use this blog as inspiration for your own online PR agency or in-house brainstorms…

1. The Million Dollar Homepage

Created by Alex Tew, an at-the-time 21-year-old entrepreneur, the Million Dollar Homepage is a fantastic example of great online PR, highlighting the transient nature of online business. He set out with the aim of creating $1 million by selling $1 million pixels on the landing page for just $1 each (sold in groups of 100) which would each link to another webpage. The more traffic that was driven to the site, the higher the value of the ads, and it took just 138 days for Alex to sell all pixels on the website.

In 2014, the Guardian published an interesting report, using research by David Yanofsky, on how 675 of the 3,066 external links (22%) were broken and no longer redirected to any webpage.

2. Gangnam Style

Let’s be honest, you can’t hear the phrase ‘Gangnam Style’ these days without singing along to that annoying little tune in your head, and most of us would be better off for never having heard it. That being said, it is one of the most successful viral campaigns we’ve ever come across, thanks to both Psy and the YG Entertainment team.

The song was catchy and the dance routine was easy to learn. From here, there were many seeding platforms involved, the YG Entertainment team utilised their Youtube channel (with, at the time, 2.5m followers) and Psy was everywhere and working with everyone, including Scooter Braun – the manager for Justin Bieber!

This was such a fantastic example of online PR, our MD – the one and only Andy Barr – wrote a white paper on this, titled ‘How Gangnam Style went viral’.

3. The Ka’s Evil Twin

The advertising geniuses over at Ford (clearly headed up by Doctor Evil) wanted to shout about the launch of the new Ford SportKa and decided to take a little bit of a darker strategy by opting to showcase how the car can kill off pesky animals.

In one video the sunroof slightly opens on a Ford SportKa and a nearby cat has gone in for a look. After popping his head through the sunroof, presumably to have a nosey or to possibly jump in and get cosy, it closes and beheads the cat. But my absolute favourite is when a pigeon flies on over and before he can poop on the shiny new car, the bonnet pops open and knocks the pigeon into the next universe.

While it didn’t take long for the videos to be pulled from the airwaves, thanks to the internet we can still view these online and appreciate them in all of their evil glory.

4. Polo: Small But Tough

The advertising team at Polo are geniuses; we absolutely loved the ‘Polo: Small But Tough’ campaign that depicted their car as the most indestructible object in the world. An elephant sitting on it can’t crush it, a bomb going off inside it can’t destroy it and the police even use it as a shield during a siege during one promo. For a campaign that started in 2005, it’s still getting A LOT of love online, showing its timeless appeal.

5. The Original ‘Blair Witch’ Project

In 1999, when social media was unheard of and the internet was still in its infancy, stories focusing on urban legends were often drip-fed onto various sites around the internet. One particular story was spun about three student filmmakers who’d disappeared in the woods and a subsequent film was created from ‘found footage’. In the lead up to the film’s release, missing posters were placed everywhere for the three ‘missing’ students, a website was created that included interviews with the victim’s ‘families’ and the urban legend quickly became a tale that everyone believed.

Before the film even made it to the cinemas, the offline and online PR efforts amassed more than 20 million page views to the Blair Witch website – something that even the biggest blockbuster movies today would struggle to achieve.

6. KFC First To Promote Mean Tweets

Back in 2014, Charlie Burness decided to take to Twitter to complain about the fries on sale in KFC, claiming that the fast food chain was ‘riding solely on their chicken’. Fast forward four years later and people noticed that KFC had not only promoted the negative tweet, along with two others, but they’d also had ads printed and dotted around the UK’s highstreets.

This brilliant online PR campaign started the phenomena that many of us now know as ‘mean tweets’ and many companies are jumping on the bandwagon to promote negative tweets about their own products in order to announce something brand new…

I've got to say, KFC are riding solely on their chicken because Christ, those are crap fries.
— Burnessie (@charliejburness) August 11, 2014

7. Carlsberg Rehashes The Mean Tweets Campaign

Five years after the huge success of KFC’s ‘mean tweets’ campaign, Carlsberg promoted five negative tweets about their brand online, which was swiftly followed by a video of employees reading aloud mean tweets about the taste of their beer, comparing it to urine and bathwater. This campaign came with the announcement that the brand had rebrewed its beer and the recipe now tasted much better.

Sometimes it’s OK to rehash a really great online PR campaign, especially five years down the line when it’s become an oldie but a goodie. This just shows that sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to generate excellent exposure.

8. Diesel Jeans XXX Porn Video

Wanting to celebrate their 30^th birthday in a controversial and memorable way, Diesel created a short film entitled ‘SFW XXX’ using pornographic clips from the 1980s. The video in no way features jeans, it quite simply takes NSFW clips and makes them SFW in a completely hilarious way. Why did it work? Because it got people talking! Fancy seeing that on your TV while you’re sat with your parents waiting for the soaps, or have friends around for dinner. The internet is still talking about this now, more than 10 years later, showing it to be a fantastic example of online PR!

Word to the wise: wear headphones as the sounds themselves are a bit of a giveaway if you’re going to watch it whilst you’re actually at work!

9. One Red Paperclip (for a house)

Kyle MacDonald started out with one red paperclip in 2005 and, after many successful trades, built his way up to securing himself a house. Yes, you read that right, a real home that he could live in.

As a child, Kyle played a game called ‘bigger and better’ where you trade something that you have for something even better, and he wondered how this could work as a young adult. Starting out with a single red paperclip, Kyle worked his way up to things like an ‘instant party’ (an IOU empty keg and a Budweiser sign), a recording contract and, ultimately, he was offered a house in Canada.

Kyle’s story went far and wide and was getting picked up by online news outlets, TV and radio; rock stars were getting in touch with him, movie stars were getting in touch with him; people both loved and trolled Kyle online (especially when he traded a day with Alice Cooper for a snowglobe!). He has a book about the project, he has gone on to speak around the world (the below video is a fantastic watch!!) and he has made it his life’s work to take fun ideas and turn them into interesting projects, from buying everything in a store (to prevent a store going out of business) and hitchhiking to all 50 states.

10. Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty

This online PR campaign has been ongoing for 15 years and is a personal favourite of mine because it’s built around the basis of female empowerment, self-beauty and tugging on those heart strings. Numerous videos have cropped up where women have the option to walk through either an ‘average’ or a ‘beautiful’ entrance, women have had to draw themselves and compare their drawing to an artist’s drawing and they’ve also committed to a ‘No Digital Distortion’ Mark to showcase natural beauty in all its glory.

It’s not only been a huge success online, it also took the brand’s sales from $2.5 billion to over $4 billion in the first 10 years alone.

Now I’ve shared some of our all-time favourite online PR campaigns that are in no way associated with 10 Yetis Digital, it’s only right I now share some of the best client campaigns we’ve created and executed as an online PR agency equally as proud of our own work…

11. Paradise Or Bust, Fiji (Tribewanted)

One of the very first online PR clients that we had here at 10 Yetis, many moons ago, was a company called Tribewanted. The team leased an island and wanted to build a sustainable village with the help of Chief Tui Mali and his tribe. Over the course of five years, the team welcomed over 2,000 people who wanted to celebrate the traditional Fijian village way of life, with holidaymakers staying for between one and four weeks.

We secured extensive media coverage for the launch of this unique project, which then led to a five-part BBC documentary called ‘Paradise or Bust’.

12. The Sleep Calculator (Hillarys Blinds)

The Sleep Calculator is a simple idea; users enter what time they need to wake up to be told what time they should go to bed OR they can select that they’re going to bed now and it will tell them what time to set their alarms for. The research behind this online tool is based around scientific data on sleep patterns and aims to ensure users set their alarms to wake up between sleep cycles to wake up feeling their best.

It’s a fantastic piece of online PR that we can continually push year after year, particularly around key dates; the clocks changing, school holidays, etc. It’s also led to numerous variations, such as the Jet Lag Calculator, The Lost Sleep Calculator For Parents and The Lost Sleep Calculator For Pet Owners.

13. Human Bullet Tester (UKPaintball)

A fantastic example of a low-budget online PR stunt for a client was the Human Bullet Tester job application for UKPaintball. The brand offered a pro rata salary of £40k to one lucky person who wanted to go around the country to numerous paintballing locations and be the human bullet tester; applicants had to have a high pain threshold, as you can imagine!

More than 10,000 applicants applied for the job and, after sifting through all applications, the team hired the best person for the job! We generated more than 60 follow links and 150+ pieces of coverage worldwide for this stunt and you can read our case study about it 'Human Bullet Impact Tester'.

14. Drunk Driver Social Experiment (Confused.com)

To help bolster Confused.com’s Christmas campaign that was geared towards reminding Britons not to drink and drive, we handled a video campaign that aimed to highlight how many people would help a ‘drunk’ actor get into his car – the answer: a shocking amount!

The video had 58,000+ organic views, 52+ inbounds links with a DA of 70+ and generated coverage in the likes of the Daily Mirror, The Independent, Sunday Times and The Sun – amongst many others.

15. Nail Polish Tester (nailbox)

This has to get a mention a) because it was my client and my campaign and b) because, although we’re not huge fans of the word, it went “VIRAL” like I’ve never experienced before; my friends had seen it online and were talking about it, it went global, it really just took on a life of its own.

With a pro-rata salary of £35k, who wouldn’t want to test a monthly supply of nail polishes and accessories, especially if it means not doing the housework, gardening or anything strenuous that can damage the hands?! While this was meant to be an online PR campaign aimed at the UK press and UK entrants, the campaign quickly went global.

We saw 70,000+ applications flood the website, 120+ pieces of coverage and 116+ links back to the nailbox website.

So there you have it, our roundup of the best online PR campaigns. Feel free to use the comments section below to remind us of other fantastic examples or even share your own successful campaigns with us.

And if you’re ever interested in outsourcing your PR to an online PR agency, or you’d like an agency to assist your in-house team, do contact us to discuss how we may be able to work together.