I love stories where the subject has to take a big risk to get a big reward, and one such placement is Lee Hawkins' Wall Street Journal coverage of how Rob Vito of Unequal Technologies decided to hire Michael "dog fighter" Vick as the celebrity spokesman for his line of football pads.
News that Mr. Vick had signed his first endorsement deal since leaving prison caused a media explosion. "Within 24 hours, we had about 10 million hits on the website, and I was on CNN, Bloomberg, Fox, ABC and CBS," Mr. Vito recalled. "We had so many hits, it crashed our site."
The exposure gave Mr. Vito a chance to talk about Unequal's insoles, golf grips, sneakers and body padding, which are currently available only on the company's website. "The sales went up 1,000% when Mike came on board," Mr. Vito said.
I need to separate my personal feelings about Vick (which are negative) to my respect for the PR person who decided that flogging this project in The Wall Street Journal was a good idea in the first place.
Whoever he was (oh come on, you know it was a he), he ran right at the worst thing anyone could say about the company and its strategic decision and made it the centerpiece of the pitch. And the story is an overwhelming postive look at a successful program execution for a company I had never heard of prior to opening that morning's paper.
Too many corporations are too afraid to take risks to get a reward so it's worth saluting those who do. I just wish we could say no dogs died in the production of this blog post - because they did.
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