With marketing service companies, internal marketing organizations, and individuals all trying to get noticed by exploiting new technology services and social media channels, it’s interesting to see how one person can create tremendous personal PR by being smart, creative, and knowledgeable of the symbiotic nature of hot technology and the media/bloggers. Such is the case with the virtually unknown musician known as R. Vaughn, formally toiling in obscurity in beautiful Hawaii. Yesterday, he was unknown; today, tens of thousands, if not more, have heard of him and at least one of his songs.

How did he succeed? He shot a low-budget music video (with the help of a friend, John Garcia, who may deserve joint or more credit) and managed to secure the lead in a CNN article on using the iPhone to create incredibly cheap videos and films. We don’t know how many hits his site has had — perhaps he will let us know in a follow up post that will be sure to be picked up by CNN and tech blogs — but I’m sure he’s had to up his monthly bandwidth quota.

What do we take from Ryan Gonzalez — the singer’s real name — and his PR triumph? That marketing/publicity success in this incredibly noisy and crowded digital world can be overcome in creative, intelligent ways. Keys to this specific effort included:

• Hitching onto a successful third-party product/service (Apple’s iPhone 4).
• Leveraging an existing mainstream site that actively recruits user input (cnn.com and its iReport initiative).
• Following up the PR blast with a site that can showcase the resulting PR (the R. Vaughn site).

What’s the next step?

• Letting the story virally infect pro-Apple sites and tech blogs, or actively promoting it if necessary (e.g., monitoring Mac Daily News and Engadget).
• Fueling the frenzy on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites.
• Following up with the inevitable calls and emails from marketing and music sites/blogs that want to document the story.

While this amazing promotional success may mark the height of the popularity of Mr. Gonalez’s music, his strategy to gain free, massive PR will live on … no doubt emulated by thousands of marketers and perhaps millions of individuals over the coming days and months. Most likely, he nor anyone else will be able to strike gold twice (e.g., shoot the first iPhone 5 video and get similar free press). Like the initial self-promotional success of musicians on MySpace and YouTube, once the word gets out on something that worked, every one will try and copy the strategy, and, as a result, the strategy won’t be effective again. Still, this story is a great example of how existing sites and smart thinking can be used to generate the PR that campaigns costing tens of thousands of dollars can’t match.

Marketers today are under extreme pressure to get results in a world crowded with creative, technology-infused messaging and promotional campaigns. Novel efforts, such as the Old Spice Guy response videos, seem so obvious after the fact that we wonder why no one else did it before. Other times, when you hear of a cutting-edge program to push the boundaries on what has been done, you get that uneasy feeling that a firm is crossing the chasm that Spinal Tap made famous: The fine line between stupid and clever.

The right side of the line: "Silverfish hand catch!"

“Too far.” Such was my reaction to the news that Uniliver had approved of Bullet’s plan to embed GPS tracking technology in boxes of Omo detergent in Brazil — with the goal of tracking down those who bought one of the boxes, filming their reaction, and offering them prizes.

As detailed in an AdAge article, the technology and processes behind the campaign are disconcerting from a privacy perspective (with many media stories using the word “stalking”):

Fifty Omo boxes implanted with GPS devices have been scattered around Brazil, and Mr. Figueiredo has teams in 35 Brazilian cities ready to leap into action when a box is activated. The nearest team can reach the shopper’s home “within hours or days,” and if they’re really close by, “they may get to your house as soon as you do,” he said … Once there, the teams have portable equipment that lets them go floor by floor in apartment buildings until they find the correct unit, he said.

Now contrast this to a successful stunt pulled by the same firm two years ago: putting disguised iPods in frozen popsicle packages. The current campaign involves privacy issues and will create a mild promotional bump if successful (just how many people are actually going to follow the box discoveries on the campaign site?). “Winners” are unlikely to be the Facebook-loving, younger generation that is less concerned with privacy than with seeing themselves on TV or on YouTube. The previous/iPod campaign simply offered an unexpected but most likely highly-appreciated prize. Even if Apple’s gadget wasn’t your thing, there was no harm (and surely some younger relative would love it).

If you were a Unilever exec, hoping to see more boxes of Omo leave stores in the hands of excited brand loyalists or even just opportunist consumers hoping for a freebie, which campaign would you be excited about? Is the risk worth the potential payoff? A backlash against this campaign won’t just be heard in Brazil — it will reverberate globally among marketing professionals.

Yes, cutting-edge marketing entails risk, but sometimes the risk-reward ratio seems out of proportion. In the case of the Omo-GPS campaign, I’ll happily be labeled conservative and say some ideas are better off left on the table. Unless, of course, the Old Spice Guy could make those GPS trackers turn into diamonds on video. Now that would be the ultimate promotional coup.