James Blunt – When PR is so bad, its good

Thousands of angry web users have taken to Twitter after receiving unsolicited email from James Blunt, plugging his new single ‘Bonfire Heart’.

The news quickly reached mainstream press attracting a wave of negative publicity due to the naughtiness of Atlantic Records (parent firm of Warner Music Group) when marketing the single.

Mass mailing over 1 million people who did not signup for updates is depraved enough but add to that a subject line of “I’d like you to be the first to hear my new single” is just plain rude.

This act spurred many bloggers and news curators into overdrive as they fell over each other to pronounce the campaign a PR fail.

Granted, on moral grounds it may well be however as the saying goes, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”.

Because once you look past the negativity you will find this little stunt gained Mr Blunt coverage in: The Independent, The Guardian, Metro, MTV, Nme, Heat World, Gigwise, Holy Moly!, Express, Inquirer, Huffington Post, 98FM, Digital Spy, USA Today, Entertainmentwise, Gizmodo, MSN.com, Yahoo.com and many more publications + the 1 million victims and their twitter followers.

That is no doubt an – EPIC WIN.

So much so that we believe this might be a top contender for the Best PR stunt 2013.

The singer had not released a new track since ‘Some Kind Of Trouble’ 3 years ago which speculates a come back and suggests that this whole ‘accident’ is an elaborate PR stunt by the record label to remind Britons of an artist that has been out of the game for a while.

A trending tweet on the subject is from “hayley from Paramore” who screenshot the email:

Don’t lie to me James Blunt, I know you sent this to like a thousand other girls.… http://t.co/XBwSDzRJd3

— hayley from Paramore (@yelyahwilliams) July 29, 2013
James Blunt also personally responded on Twitter:

Oops… Just emailed the whole of the UK by mistake! Ha!

— James Blunt (@DirtyLilBlunt) July 29, 2013

A spokesperson from Warner Music has ‘confirmed’ that the emails were sent out in error to subscribers of other artists on the label.