And the award for lamest stunt to promote a (mediocre) song goes to US act Yacht – a fake sex video (with no sex)
(By Joanna Hobart) Yacht, an American dance-pop band from Portland, Oregon, currently based in Los Angeles, California, is going to win the award for the lamest PR stunt this year. Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans claimed in a post on Facebook that an intimate video they made together had been leaked to the public and so they had started to spread it themselves (weird twist n’est-ce pas?). It actually was a way to promote their (not so brilliant) song “I Wanna Fuck You Til I’m Dead”.
According to Yacht their ‘sex’ tape (holding no sex at all) was a stunt intended to “explore the intersection of privacy, media, and celebrity”, in other words, they looked for some cheap publicity. Yacht’s PR company Motormouthmedia probably saw the backlash this very poorly executed PR thingie would get and quickly distanced themselves from the band.
Here’s the video they posted on Pornhub etc.. Note that if they wouldn’t have created all the mayhem around it, the video would actually have been a funny one, but knowing the context of how this one was marketed, it’s not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0cxpv2JRgY
The backlash came quite quick as many see the action of the band as nothing else but trivialising revenge porn. Not exactly what the duo had hoped for of course.
Lawyer Carrie Goldberg, whose New York law firm helps victims of internet harassment, told The Guardian that he considers it to be “a bullshit marketing stunt (…) As somebody who spends all day, every day working with actual victims of nonconsensual porn and rapes that have videos and gone viral, I just thought: ‘Where are these guys, I’m going to come and hunt them down’.” And he adds: “My fear is that next time somebody’s sex video goes viral without consent everyone’s going to stop and say: ‘Wait wait wait, we can’t believe her, this is just a stunt’.”
Bechtolt and Evans have responded now saying that they “never make light of victims of any form of sexual abuse”. Here’s what the duo wrote as well: “Frankly, it’s disturbing to us that press outlets could make the incredibly irresponsible leap from “celebrity sex tape,” which is the cultural trope this project explicitly references, to “revenge porn,” which is unfunny, disgusting, morally repugnant, and completely unrelated. Even within the fictional narrative we created, there was no violence or exploitation. It was always about agency and proactive empowerment.”
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