It’s a familiar situation for most PR teams – a story breaks, the internet goes mad for it, and someone in the group chat types “we should post something on this.” 

‘Newsjacking’ or ‘piggyback PR’ means attaching your brand to a trending story, and it can be brilliant when it’s fast, funny, and true to who you are. It can also be a career-defining mistake when a brand mistakes proximity to a story for permission to comment on it.

Rooftopping the news

A prime example of newsjacking came served on a 102-storey platter recently – incase you somehow missed it, Russian “rooftoppers” Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus – stars of the Netflix documentary “Skywalkers: A Love Story” – recently broke into the Empire State Building overnight, climbed past locked security doors to the broadcast antenna and staged a marriage proposal while a helicopter and hundreds of onlookers watched from the street. Police had to power down the antenna, which emits radio frequencies strong enough to injure a person, before an NYPD emergency unit could reach the couple. The pair now face burglary, reckless endangerment, and criminal mischief charges. Major stunt. Massive publicity.

In the middle of the story going viral, predictably, every single brand and their mother tried to climb aboard, adapting the circulating imagery and injecting their brand persona into the copy. 

Here were a few of our favourite responses…

Canva enlarged the couple’s banner and overlaid “Make the sign bigger with Canva,” editing the scene so Beerkus appeared to hold up a laptop reading “Try Canva for free now” – two product messages, zero media spend, and a punchline that needed no explanation.

DoorDash skipped the banner entirely and recreated its own delivery drop-off notification, with a branded bag sitting at the antenna’s tip: “Your order was dropped off. Please refer to this photo that your Dasher provided to see where it was left.” Every DoorDash user has received that exact confusing photo – the joke was built entirely from the brand’s own product experience.

Duolingo Deutschland reimagined the couple as its Duo owl mascot and turned the proposal into a German vocabulary lesson, captioned “If he wanted to, he would.” It was funny, but more importantly it was consistent – the same playful, culture-jacking voice Duolingo has used for years.

Even the Empire State Building’s own team gets points for its response: recreating the engagement ring photo from its official observation deck and reminding people they could book the same view – no illegal climb required. It redirected the story back to something the building actually sells, without needing to touch the crime itself.

Where brands got it wrong

Not every entry cleared the bar. Without pointing any fingers, there was also a huge wave of near-identical AI-generated banner-swap images with no real connection to what any of those companies sell. In fact, there was definitely a certain irony to some brands hijacking the couple’s peace-themed banner to sell products, with much discourse online around the original moment becoming stripped of all meaning entirely.

That’s the pattern behind bad newsjacking: a brand notices an easy-to-copy template, swaps in a logo with no real product link, and posts because everyone else is posting. The joke doesn’t need that specific brand to work – any logo could be dropped in and nothing would be lost. At scale, dozens of interchangeable versions of the same image stop feeling clever and become irritating.

Good newsjacking follows a few consistent rules:

Speed serves relevance, not just reach. The best reactive posts (Oreo’s “You can still dunk in the dark” during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout is the classic example) work because the brand’s product is genuinely, cleverly connected to the moment – not because the brand happened to be nearby.

The tone matches the moment. A lighthearted event earns a lighthearted response. A story involving injury, crime, or real risk to people demands either silence or a response that takes the seriousness seriously before finding the angle.

It doesn’t require the brand to minimise harm to make the joke work. If your punchline only lands by glossing over the fact that someone broke the law, disabled safety equipment, or put first responders at risk, it’s not a joke – it’s a liability.

It’s on-brand, not just on-trend. The best newsjacks feel like something only that brand could have said. A generic “wow, love wins!” post could have come from anyone; it adds nothing and risks everything.

The real lesson

The instinct to jump on a viral moment isn’t the problem – it’s the failure to pause and ask what the story is actually about before hitting publish. 

Speed gets a brand in the door, but it isn’t the thing that makes a newsjack land. The posts that worked all had a genuine, specific product angle baked into the joke, delivered in a voice that only that brand could use. The ones that didn’t work were the ones chasing the trend itself rather than adding anything to it. Before hitting publish on a reactive post, the only question that matters is: could any other brand have made this exact post? If the answer is yes, it’s not a newsjack – it’s just noise with a logo on it.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re about to go try and scale our office balcony in the hopes that it’ll make the front page…