Hot Wheels is a brand that has been pulling off monumental stunts for a while. In fact, it’s a brand that has more-or-less ditched the ad budget and has switched everything into becoming all about brand entertainment, rather than brand marketing as we know it.

Sunday saw them pull this little number off …

Now at this stage, the normal question that I would seek to answer is “why did it work?”.

To be honest, if you need to know the answer to that one then PR might not be your game.

But the thing that is interesting is that this is what can happen when a brand can be convinced that a PR-led approach to its marketing can be made to work – and that the money that was being spent on a mass of ad production could be channelled into stunts that will get talked about. Which, by the way, will still leave plenty of change from the media budget.

And it’s an approach that we’re seeing more and more fmcg and fashion brands adopt.

From Burberry to DC Shoes (with their Ken Block tie-ups) all the way through to past-masters of the art, Red Bull.

So the next time that someone in the agency whinges about how the other marketing outfits get all the big budgets, maybe it’s time to show them the Hot Wheels approach.

Global media space, epic-scale social buzz, built on the simple strategy of taking the entertainment brand approach of the product into the brand marketing itself.

And all thanks to one stunt that really did take off.

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR and from time-to-time pens Spinning Around, a blog that he describes as “thinking out loud”