THE GOAL:To promote Toshiba’s "No Matter What Guarantee".

A promise to replace any laptop no matter how it got broken.Great product, no public profile. Even worse, market feedbackshowed that the few who had heard about the guarantee regardedit as a hoax.

THE OBJECTIVE:Since people believed the No Matter What Guarantee was too good to be true our PR objective was clear: to create awareness and credibility for the product.THE STRATEGY:Scandal.

We surprised Romania’s most controversial TV host by creatingan electrical fault that blew up his famous laptop on live TV.Due to the host’s highly disputed public image the media activated instantly.Conspiracy theories ran riot before Toshiba replaced his laptop,gaining fame and credibility for No Matter What.

At POS laptops destroyed by incredible accidents reinforcedthe message.THE RESULTS:30,000 YouTube views. Blog coverage reached 4.3m.

Traditional media delivered 4.8m.POS reached 1.5m.

Sales rose 40%.

We turned to Mircea Badea - the most controversial TV host in Romania with one of the most popular evening shows. We surprised him by staging an electrical fault that blew his laptop up on live TV. This was even more inciting as Mr. Badea is known to use his laptop extensively during the show.The lights went off, there was an explosion and smoke came out of the laptop. The 'accident' became the topic of the evening.The next morning 'the Badea incident' sparked conspiracy theories and debates becoming a national scandal through all media channels. Two days later we returned to the show and made our No Matter What Guarantee real again on live prime time TV. We gave Mircea Badea a new Toshiba laptop and backed up our message with spot advertising to reinforce the impact of the reveal.

We attracted massive coverage online and offline through both traditional and non-traditional media.

Images of the incident posted on the channel website brought 20,000 views.YouTube videos were watched 30,000 times.Blogs provided an additional 28 articles about the stunt with more than 4,300,000 readers.Conventional media coverage delivered further 4,800,000 readers via print and additionally 341,000 online readers.Finally Toshiba laptop sales went up 40% post-campaign versus 20% projected.