Poor PR person braves bear suit in tropical heat for Hasbro royal baby stunt

By on Tuesday, July 16, 2013

We all remember those horrendous things we’ve done in the name of PR. Dressing up as novelty characters for clients is a regular ask of interns and execs and well, if you don’t remember doing anything embarrassing, you likely just haven’t been asked yet.

As part of UK PR’s all-out, unrelenting assault on the poor unborn royal mite, which will no doubt continue for weeks after Kate’s popped him or her out, toy company Hasbro had somebody at PR agency Bite dress up as a life-size teddy bear, arriving with Prince Harry lookalike Roddy Walker to unveil a Royal Toybox ‘befitting Buckingham Palace’s new nursery and playroom’ outside St Mary’s Hospital, Buckingham Palace and St James’ Park today.

In case you don’t live in the UK, today was pretty hot (30°C+ at times).

royal baby pr stunt hasbro toys harry lookalike teddy bear

I dedicate this post to this poor soul who is now, having worn a bear outfit in near-tropical temperatures, fit to call himself a real PR person. I won’t name him because I doubt he wants to show up in Google searches for years to come in relation to this, but I will say well done (not that I imagine he had much choice in the matter!).

‘Harry’ and the manbear unveiled a giftbox filled with Hasbro products including Play Doh, My Little Pony and Furby and invited the general public to name the royal baby’s teddy bear, to be in with a chance to win a Hasbro Royal Toybox of their own. The public can suggest names by tweeting with the hashtag #RoyalTeddy. At the time of writing, there have been just shy of 200 mentions of the hashtag in the last 24 hours, from the likes of Sky News’ royal correspondent Paul Harrison and the Mail’s Vicky Woollaston (who lost cool points by boringly opting to name the bear ‘Dave’. This is a woman, bare in mind, who appeared on Countdown in April).

The campaign has so far had coverage on ITV, Huffington Post, The Guardian, Hello! and a few other places to boot.

A couple of years ago I Storified tweets around the subject of embarrassing and/or funny things people have done in the name of PR, which, if you have a bit of time and click here, you might enjoy.

Finally, if you see or are working on any royal baby tie-ins, send them my way by tweeting me @RichLeighPR, or emailing me on rich [at] prexamples dot com. It’d be great to pull together a compilation of them. Go on, I know you’re working on them, especially if you’re UK-based.

Involved agency: Bite Global

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