David “The Hoff” Hasselhoff’s seminar for Golin was the talk of the town on the first day of the 2014 Cannes Lions.
David Hasselhof’s fame received a digital shot in the arm on the first day of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity when he spoke at a seminar sponsored by PR giant Golin (the former GolinHarris). The focus of the talk, titled, “Relevance and the Hoff” set out to show how a brand, any brand (including washed-up TV stars) could benefit from the right kind of social media push. To illustrate their point, Golin launched “#hoffornot” an app launched 48 hours before the Baywatch star took to the stage. Bolstered by a series of online videos wherein Hasselhoff reached out to the likes of Ellen Degeneres and Simon Cowell, users were encouraged to differentiate between legitimate images of the Knight Rider star and those of a lookalike. In the two days leading up to the seminar, 60 million users got in on the action, proving the value of the stunt.
Met by a capacity crowd’s boisterous applause when he took to the stage armed with one of the bright orange torpedo buoys that Baywatch made famous, “The Hoff” spoke on his experiences maintaining relevance in an increasingly digital world, citing that maintaining an active online presence and working on internet-exclusive ads and webisodes had actually helped to introduce a new wave of “Hoffmania”. Following the seminar, Hasselhoff was interviewed with Golin president Matt Neil.
According to Neil, the choice to go with Hasselhoff as their featured “brand” was based on his willingness to go along with some of the more outlandish social media stunts that made up #hoffornot. “It’s almost like you have…new media starting a career in old media again. It’s a fascinating thing to watch.”
“What we’ve done with the Hoff today is a creative analogy for what you can do with any brand,” continued Neil. “You can’t come to Cannes and present a white paper; this is the biggest creative audience in the world, it’s a massive platform, so we try to bring insight and data – in our case, relevance – to life in a creative way using a brand that everyone knows. You can apply all the science we applied to the Hoff to any brand, whether it be cars, clothing or FMCG, the principles are the same.
On his “brand’s” longevity years after his series have ended, Hasselhoff spoke with his by-now trademark self-deprecation, saying, “Creativity is seeing it, believing it, creating it. You create what you want in your life, (and) you have to do it, you must do it yourself. Don’t ever say, ‘No!’ to David Hasselhoff, he will stand on a street corner and sell CDs until it goes platinum. I get motivated by that.”
by Mikhail Lecaros
