Publicity stunt – (
n) a staged marketing event staged used to garner publicity.
The staff working with the NBC remake of the Knight Rider series was busy doing a promo event in Toronto Friday when a bittersweet twist threw a wrench in their plans.
The good? The star steed of the show, KITT, has been plastered throughout YouTube by amateur videographers who filmed it being stolen. The bad? Um…KITT has been “stolen.”
As can be seen in the videos posted in the reply below, the trained driver of the 2008 GT500KR Mustang exits the vehicle shortly after driving it off the truck to go tie up loose ends on the delivery vehicle. Suddenly, a random passerby sprints to the driver’s seat and takes off into the vast Canadian metropolis.
Shock. Confusion. Embarrassment.
…Or a brilliant marketing opportunity from the web-savvy PR team at NBC. We cannot confirm any of the speculation, but it looks like the blogging community wasn’t quite buying it throughout the weekend. Jerrold over at blogto.com even
contacted the Toronto Police and network executives, failing to find any official police reports or announcements from the network.
My personal reason for remaining skeptical about this story is the fashion in which the “amateur” footage was uploaded to YouTube. The plethora of footage at the event (posted below) was uploaded under different usernames, but I spotted a dubious trend in the similarity between the tags used—perhaps to optimize their search engine capabilities? This is viral marketing 101.
Whatever the story is, we just hope the KITT is returned to its rightful owners so that it can make its eventual return to our TV screens in the
brilliant remake of Knight Rider.
Thanks to
ELITE 1 for the
heads-up. Check out the footage of the "theft" in the reply below.
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