The buzz about the Soho launch of fashion retail outlet Topshop is overwhelming, and has been building to almost intolerable levels amid faulty openings and launch date rumors since fall. At first, I thought that the blogs were only jumping on the bandwagon of excitement, but as someone who recently picked up a few items at an international outlet and has caught Topshop fever, I can say that the anticipation is legit.

I can also say that KCD - the agency handling PR for the NYC launch – is doing its job. The agency is generating serious pre-launch buzz through its outreach, grassroots efforts - guerilla street teams handing out gift cards – pre-launch parties, and the Apr. 2 opening event with an appearance by Kate Moss, one of the shop’s British design partnerships for the US outlet. This Thursday, I recommend helmets and knee pads within a block of the store.

KCD declined to comment on PR activity supporting the launch.

Asked about blogger-payment programs conducted by what many believe to be a growing number of communications professionals, Don Bates, professor at George Washington University, told PRWeek via e-mail that such efforts aren’t controversial, or new. Said Bates: “A minority of PR firms has been using paid advertising and paid media for as long as I can remember, and I’ve been around the business for more than 35 years.”

“Paid media is a reasonable extension of PR services, and to my way of thinking, something that should be considered, especially in this era of digital communications when so much is moving to the Wild West of online,” he said.

However, Bates added, the practice “is not for the uninitiated.”

“It may look easy but it isn’t. The required research, art, copy, placement, billing, administration – all are different than their counterparts in PR,” he added. “Then there’s the potential impact on your media relations work. Once you start advertising, the media will start to treat you like an ad agency with potentially negative consequences for your client’s or employer’s press coverage.”

Today, December 10, is National Day Without A Gay, where those in support of same-sex marriage are encouraged to “call in gay” and skip work to prove the value of the community. The event, which coincides with International Human Rights Day, encourages participants to then volunteer or give back to the community. Its goal is to show the impact of the LGBT community and its supporters, and rally against the passing of California’s Proposition 8.

Organizations including Out & Equal Workplace Advocates and Join the Impact have thrown their support behind the cause. Blogs discussing the effort include , Change.org, AfterEllen, and former Project Runway contestant Jack Mackenroth.

Mainstream  like The New York Times and other papers have been covering the event. Organizers are also using and to spread the word.

More details emerged November 13 about the phony issue of The New York Times distributed to commuters this week by an alliance of liberal activist groups and volunteers.

• Andy Bichlbaum, co-founder of Yes Men, a group partially responsible for the prank, told the New York Post that small donations funded the bulk of the event’s $100,000 cost.
• New York Magazine reports that while activist organizations got most of the credit for the stunt, many of the individuals who authored the paper are media members, including a few from the derided newspaper itself. “There were a few people from the Times – we can’t tell you who they are,” Steve Lambert, an organizer, told New York. “They’re respectable journalists.”
• The Times, which gave the prank coverage on page C7, whether the groups inflated the number of distributed copies. “The statement said that 1.2 million copies were printed, more than the weekday circulation nationwide for real issues of the Times,” reported Richard Perez-Pena and Brian Stelter. “That number is suspect, if only because of the printing costs that would be involved.”

ASA Entertainment continues with its streak of high-profile action sports events, partnering with LG Mobile Phones for the LG Action Sports World Championships in Seattle, from October 31 to November 2.

But this year, the sixth year of sponsorship for LG, the event has a political twist. LG partnered with youth voter initiative Declare Yourself, which has been ramping up its own partnerships leading up to the election on November 4.

At the LG Action Sports World Championship, which features action sports and musical performances from The Game, Pennywise, MxPx, and Hoobastank, LG is handing out t-shirts, hats, and skateboard decks with the Declare Yourself message to vote, said Denise Abbott, director of media relations for ASA. Declare Yourself videos will be played throughout the arena, and then posted online, and a text-messaging contest will also take place during the event.

Sacha Baron Cohen is back making waves as he works on his upcoming movie, Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt. Not only has Bruno, originally a character in Da Ali G Show, poked fun at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he is also suspected of stunts in Arkansas. Billed as a cage-fighting match, two events became shows of two men ripping off each other’s clothes and kissing, the Associated Press reported.

“It set the crowd off lobbing beers,” Fort Smith police Sgt. Adam Holland told the AP. “They had beers in plastic cups. Those things can get some distance on them actually.” Baron Cohen’s publicist, Matt Labov, had no comment about the faked fights.

Bands signed to the Fueled By Ramen Records, including Panic at the Disco, Phantom Planet, and Fall Out Boy, use blog posts, creative Web sites, collaborative tours, and endorsements of each other as ways to promote the bands. The label’s founder John Janick’s “instinct for grass-roots promotion has made Fueled By Ramen one of the few labels that consistently scores hits with alternative rock,” the reported today.

One example online is Panic at the Disco, which turned its Web site completely white, offering fans hidden clues about the release of its new album Pretty. Odd. Offline, many of the bands at Fueled By Ramen were found and endorsed by Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, one of the label’s first success stories. Bands go on tours together and mention each other at shows and through blog posts. On May 1, Fall Out Boy’s to-do list mention on its blog included getting the new album from Fueled By Ramen band The Cab.

“Fueled By Ramen has its acts promote one another as well as the company itself, as indie labels have done since the 1960s heyday of Motown and Stax,” the Times reported. “But Mr. Janick has brought such cross-promotion into the Internet era, where fans of one band are just a click away from information on another on the label’s Web site.”

For some folks, watching online videos and trashing Fox News makes for a perfect afternoon. Those folks are in luck. Guerrilla filmmaker Robert Greenwald and US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) yesterday launched a viral video campaign urging major TV networks to not follow in Fox’s “war-mongering” footsteps.

Greenwald’s three-minute video — a compilation of political- and media-figure sound bites, graphics, and clips from Fox’s coverage of both the 2003 Iraq invasion and recent events in Iran — has already been passed along and viewed more than 69,000 times, according to his Fox Attacks! Web site. (So many times, in fact, that the site reportedly crashed earlier in the day.)

Along with the (some would say) ideologically slanted video, Greenwald and Sanders presented an open letter to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC, calling for the networks to provide viewers with “accurate and reliable information” and to “not blindly follow Fox down the road to another war.”

Read more »

Just when it seemed that all the cross-platform, “is it real or is it a shrewd, under-the-radar movie marketing campaign?” had gone on August hiatus, yet another revealed itself last week in Los Angeles. Quicker than you could say “Faces of Death: Fact or Fiction?” it had the blogosphere abuzz — and the general consensus is, this one’s gone too far.

The gist of it is this: Sometime around early August, relatively authentic-looking “missing” posters began appearing around LA asking for help in finding an Agora Hills 22-year-old female, last seen on June 2. “Where is Amy Pressman?” the posters ask, above a photo of the “victim” and a link to the .

Amy, of course, has , full of ominous poetry and entries about the unsavory characters met during her family’s summer road trip. If this were real, it would be scary stuff, covered by evening news broadcasts across the nation.

Oddly, it wasn’t. Spurred by that (and perhaps Amy’s miserable verse), a handful of online detectives traced the drama back to Fourth Floor Productions, a Sherman Oaks, CA-based marketing firm. Though Fourth Floor has yet to claim responsibility for any of this, its Web site tells a different story:

The Young Guns of Hollywood are in town and stirring up some trouble. Looking to make the mark in the ever-competitive film industry. This group is comprised of some seriously talented people; creating not just future works of art, but a buzz they seem to call, Controversial Marketing.

Knowing that great films could never be seen without great advertising, Fourth Floor Productions strive to create both New and Fresh media that will be talked about for years.

Talked about, yes: on sites including RumorsDaily and Church of the Customer, bloggers are calling the marketing efforts “creepy” and “sleazy.” And Movie Marketing Madness calls using a missing child to build buzz an “offensive use of social media.”

Right here, too, we feed into the discourse without knowing what movie it is, whether it will be in theaters or online. What we do know is, someone is leveraging what appears to be a young woman’s abduction in the name of viral marketing. And many people have found this offensive.

Some people, however, won’t be offended, and those may be this campaign’s target audience. So should there be socially observed limits on guerilla/new media creativity? If so, how much is too much?

An Advertising Age by Matthew Creamer - formerly of PRWeek - at the effectiveness of viral marketing, or lack thereof. In the opinion of Columbia University’s Duncan Watts, the impact of influencers is overblown, at best. Watts makes an interesting case, and it’s a great article (who doesn’t love poking holes in Malcolm Gladwell’s theories?). I’m guessing, though, that the founder of Little Miss Matched, which sells “mismatched socks to tweens”, and who was interviewed about his frustration with viral efforts, might have found his sales challenging, regardless of his marketing strategy. That’s just a tough product to explain, I’m thinking.

Anyone else think the impact of viral marketing is overstated? Please send us your comments.