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A PR Nightmare Turned Into Valuable Buzz Marketing

While shooting a TV commercial for The Price Is Right video game last week, an executive’s worst nightmare happened: accidentally losing $30,000. One of the TV spots to promote the new video game included the actual video case falling down the infamous “Plinko” board into the $10,000 slot. In order to save time for shooting, the Plinko game board was rigged. Stage workers at the game show mistakenly took the same game and used it for play during that day’s game show taping, and one lucky contestant starting playing her Plinko chips. By the time producers realized what had happened, the contestant had won $30,000. The show stopped rolling tape and producers explained the mishap to the poor contestant.

Despite the mistake, CBS executives decided to give the contestant her $30,000 price money and let her play again so they could re-shoot the segment. She won $33,000 when all was said and done. What most businesses woud think was a disaster, actually turned into some valuable buzz marketing for The Price Is Right, CBS, and ThePriceIsRightVideoGame.com.

The story was quickly picked up by TMZ.com (http://www.tmz.com/2008/07/29/the-price-is-wrong/) and was also fed to AOL.com, showing up in front of thousands of viewers. This story could have sparked company wide chaos with executives fearing that people would think all The Price Is Right games are rigged. But instead, they kept their cool, and let the media take its course. Within one day of the mishap being published online, site traffic to www.ThePriceIsRightVideoGame.com spiked, and entries to their sweepstakes started to increase dramatically. Without a huge marketing push, users came to the site all on their own to check out the video game before its September 2008 release.

So what most business owners would deem a PR nightmare and a large financial loss, turned into a marketer’s dream; valuable buzz marketing leading to increased site traffic and conversions. So, was the $30,000 price tag worth it? In this case, we think the “the price is right”.

The news story ended up on AOL’s homepage as breaking news, but quickly spread into positive buzz marketing.

The Price is Right video game is expected to be released in September 2008. To enter the online sweepstakes, visit www.ThePriceIsRightVideoGame.com