So now you know, hiring someone famous to come up on stage at a product launch might not be such a great idea after all. Samsung must have thought it had pulled off quite a coup to get Michael Bay, director of blockbuster action movies such as Pearl Harbour and Transformers, to come up and talk during the presentation of its 105” curved screen Ultra High Definition TV at a pre-International CES news event. Sadly, things didn’t quite go to plan.
Bay may well be a man who can put together a real crash bang wallop film, a man who gets “to dream for a living” and “create visual worlds that are so beyond everyone’s normal life experiences” but when the teleprompter packed in, he proved to be quite a lot like the rest of us by being unable to improvise until the problem was fixed. Instead, Bay exited the stage saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry”.
On the surface, this was something of a disaster for Samsung. Certainly, the audience and the Samsung presenter appeared momentarily stunned and a little embarrassed. The compere tried to rescue the situation by asking the “ladies and gentlemen” to “thank Michael Bay for joining us” which was followed by a smattering of applause (hardly surprising as he hadn’t actually joined the ladies and gentlemen for very long).
I say this was something of a disaster on the surface because, in a perverse way, the event probably generated more publicity by going wrong than it would have done if everything had gone perfectly smoothly. Imagine if Michael Bay had stayed on stage to extol the virtues of Samsung’s TV technology and talk about his own movies at the same time. Yes, there would have been headlines in the technology press but would anyone else really have cared all that much? It would have pretty much the same as any other presentation garnished with the presence of a celebrity from the world of film, music or politics.
As it was, the event didn’t generate extra interest because of Bay’s presence but because of the circumstances of his departure. That’s not something you can plan unless you’re some kind of brilliantly devious anti-marketing marketing genius who is prepared to rip up the rule book. Even if you had a mind capable of dreaming up such an anti-intuitive stunt, you’d still need to get the celebrity to agree to pull it off.
The best thing about the Samsung debacle (or should that be triumph) is that it was totally spontaneous (a description which I haven’t heard in connection with any of Bay’s films). And there was something very apt about a man famed for making action films that aren’t renowned for the quality of their dialogue or improvisation, opting to act by leaving rather than try to fashion or improvise some dialogue until the teleprompter came back online.
It’s precisely because you can’t plan this kind of stuff that it can help to generate so much more interest and notoriety than something that has been carefully scripted and staged down to the very last detail. Every time someone looks up Bay’s exit on YouTube, they’ll see the Samsung TV and logo in the background. Every time someone says “remember when Michael Bay walked off stage”, someone else will say “oh yeah, it was at that Samsung event”. Pretty good huh?
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