Mark’s words on LinkedIn – Succession
NOW TV has made an earnest effort to imbue UK publicity for acclaimed corporate tragicomedy #Succession with the show’s spirit.
After manifesting a real-life sequel to a character’s dalliance with Scottish football, Succession’s final series was introduced with a fittingly over-the-top junket starring Brian Cox at the London Stock Exchange.
It was a nice vanilla photo opportunity, Cox is a reliably newsworthy soundbite (the more controversial, the more appropriate to the show), and it was broadly in the spirit of the art it was representing.
The launch was proficient, but Succession is genius. At its best shocking. And, much as when walking #PR stunt Borat’s return was underwhelmingly transformed into a PR cliché – it feels like Succession’s send-off deserved more than the usual fare.
The lines between PR photo opp., junket and stunt are sometimes blurry but the latter is generally categorised by a sense of surprise, subversion or danger. Sometimes that feeling alone is enough to make a stunt news.
Late great showman Joe Weston-Webb once assembled media from far and wide by claiming that he would jump a double-decker bus over the river Severn. Knowing the feat was impossible Joe tampered with the ramp, leading the stuntman he’d hired to complain that the conditions were far too dangerous for the jump to work. “That’s the point” Joe whispered when confronted with the ‘bad news’ that the stunt couldn’t go ahead. He’d already achieved the publicity before the bus was in first gear.
The point is that an eye-catching and controversial proposition – even if it’s a myth- can achieve a more significant impact than the more decadent but ultimately conventional launch Succession received.
As the Borat stunt demonstrated I’m no longer a big fan of floating things down the Thames, but for Succession, a superyacht surrounding by the (apparent) floating corpses of dead waiters, crashed cars and spaceship detritus – even if it had to be ‘cancelled because of health and safety concerns could have been reasonably striking