How Impactful is Stunt Marketing?
Some marketing stunts dominate social feeds and earn headlines overnight. Others barely register—or worse, damage brand trust. So how do you know whether stunt marketing is actually effective, or just loud?
Stunt marketing is often described as high-risk, high-reward. When executed well, it can generate massive attention in a short time. When misaligned, it can feel gimmicky or inauthentic. Understanding what stunt marketing is—and how to measure its impact—is key to deciding when it’s worth the risk.
What Is Stunt Marketing?
Stunt marketing is a creative, unexpected campaign designed to grab attention quickly and spark conversation. Unlike long-term brand campaigns, stunts are typically short-lived and centered around a moment.
Common characteristics include:
- Surprise or shock value that interrupts the audience’s expectations
- High shareability, especially on social platforms
- Time-bound execution, often tied to an event, launch, or cultural moment
At its best, stunt marketing feels spontaneous—but behind the scenes, successful stunts are carefully planned and strategically aligned.
Why Brands Use Stunt Marketing
Brands turn to stunt marketing for a few key reasons:
1. Fast Buzz Generation: Traditional campaigns can take weeks or months to gain traction. A well-executed stunt can generate widespread attention in hours or days.
2. Differentiation: In crowded markets, stunts help brands stand out. They signal boldness, creativity, and confidence—qualities that are hard to communicate through standard advertising alone.
3. Testing Agility and Engagement: Stunts allow brands to test how quickly they can respond to cultural moments and how actively their audience engages with unexpected content.
How to Quantify the Impact of a Stunt
Because stunts are short-lived, measurement needs to be immediate and multi-dimensional. Looking at just one metric rarely tells the full story.
Reach
- Social impressions and views
- Shares and reposts
- Earned media coverage and press mentions
- Reach answers the question: Did people notice?
Engagement
- Likes, comments, and saves
- Audience interactions and participation
- Sentiment in comments and conversations
- Engagement reveals whether the stunt sparked genuine interest or conversation.
Conversion
- Website traffic spikes
- Sales lift or sign-ups
- App downloads or lead generation
Conversions determine whether attention translated into business impact—not just visibility.
The true impact of stunt marketing (which is to say ROI) is only known by media buyers and analysts from the company that put on the stunt. If a production company does a stunt to promote a movie, it’s difficult for us to sit here on the outside and figure out just how much a given stunt translated to box office dollars. But what we can measure to some extent is the attention it’s getting and its cultural impact.
Severance
The popular Apple TV show that highlights the little intricacies of working an office job was in the buildup to its highly anticipated second season. A couple months out from the release, actors from the show sat in a make-shift office enclosed in a glass case in the middle of Grand Central Station in New York.
As far as locations for a marketing stunt go, somewhere with 75,000 visitors per day isn’t a bad choice. But of course, it wasn’t just the passers-by that they were trying to intrigue. The spectacle of it all quickly made the rounds on social media–both with official promotional materials from Apple TV, and recordings from those lucky enough to see it in person.
The result was a lot of news coverage. “News Search" for “Severance” on Google Trends shows that the show reached its peak news coverage in March, the week that Season 2 of the show was released, and it reached 70% of its peak news coverage in January, the week of the Grand Central Station stunt. Whether looking at news coverage or general search this stunt earned the show its second most popular week in its existence. That’s more than when season 1 came out, or any award season, or any teaser trailer release.
Marty Supreme
One of the more recent, prominent examples of stunt marketing was to promote the movie, “Marty Supreme,” a movie where Timothée Chalamet portrays a table tennis player who looks and sounds a lot like Timothée Chalamet.
The marketing for the movie included an instance where Chalamet appeared on top of The Las Vegas Sphere, with the exterior made to look like a ping pong ball.
The impact of this stunt is a little harder to pin down. Because it happened just three days before the movie's theatrical release Google searches for "Marty Supreme" were already going up, on their way to peaking the day the movie came out. The win here is earned media. Publications like People, Rolling Stone, and Vogue all covered the event whereas they probably would've ignored any other piece of promotional material. In this case it took something drastic like being the "first person" on top of the Las Vegas Sphere to warrant attention. It seems like one of the people who build The Sphere would've been the first one on top of it, but we've never built a sphere, so what do we know.
The Takeaway
Stunt marketing isn’t a shortcut—it’s a multiplier. When the brand, message, and moment align, the impact can be massive. When they don’t, the stunt becomes noise.
The most effective stunts:
- Align closely with brand purpose and voice
- Respect the audience’s expectations and values
- Are measured across awareness, engagement, sentiment, and sales
- In the end, stunt marketing isn’t about being loud—it’s about being memorable for the right reasons.