Updated September 2026
One idea, one press day, one photograph
Publicity Stunts & Cheeky PR Campaigns
One way to use Oddtoe...
The Publicity Stunt Package
For campaigners, press teams, and grassroots groups
Use Case: Publicity Stunts & Cheeky PR Campaigns
Oddtoe is an experiential design and generative-AI animation studio based in Melbourne, creating projection, installation, and animated work for events, venues, and galleries. This is a use case: how a campaign uses Oddtoe to pull off a publicity stunt or a cheeky PR campaign, from the first idea to the photograph that gets printed. The example running through it is a set of carried heads. The same steps apply to an inflatable, a projection, a mascot costume, or a kinetic sculpture.
The work is designed by a political cartoonist — chief designer for a Washington DC paper, and an editorial cartoonist before that. That background matters here, because a rally photograph and a daily cartoon are the same problem. You get one picture to make the argument, and nobody sticks around for an explanation. The stunts people remember passed that test: the Trump baby blimp over Parliament Square, or the pink boat Extinction Rebellion parked in Oxford Circus.
Ideation, sketching, and the people who carry it
Three Drawings from the Sketchbook
The first three stages of a stunt, out of the sketchbook — where the idea starts, how it gets drawn, and how people actually carry it. Click any of them to see it big.
Step one
Ideation
This one is a concept. I drew it because I wanted to see what it looked like — a modern Trojan horse crossed with Mount Rushmore, a face at monument scale that arrives on a truck, stands in the street for a day, and goes home again before anyone can hold a meeting about whether it should stay.
Step two
Sketching
Everything starts on paper, on a grid. Proportions get argued out flat, front and side, long before anything gets cut — a head that is wrong here is wrong in cane and paper as well, and by then it costs money. Those scribbled notes in the margins are the bit a maker actually builds from.
Step three
Human puppetry
Working out how anyone actually carries one of these. Where they stand, how many it takes, how the weight sits on a shoulder after an hour, whether it can turn a corner without clouting someone. All of that is a drawing problem. Leave it until the morning of the march and you are solving it in a crowd.
One idea, followed through
A STUNT, FROM BRIEF TO FRONT PAGE
Start to finish
HOW A STUNT GETS MADE
Six stages between a date in the diary and the photograph a news editor runs. Roll over a circle.
Carried heads are one answer. A giant inflatable, a projection, a mascot costume, or a kinetic sculpture goes through the same six stages.
Objects, artwork, and the footage afterwards
What Does a Campaign Actually Get?
The object, the artwork it came from, and the photos and video from the day. All of it is yours to keep, crate included, and it goes out again at the next action.
• The object — in this example four oversized heads, cane frame and papier-mâché skin
• The character artwork — the same designs flat, for placards, posters and social
• A crate it packs into and travels in
• Photos and video from the day, ready for news editors and for phones
People tend to forget about the artwork. The object is built from finished character designs, so the campaign also owns drawings that work on a poster, a placard, a t-shirt and a phone screen without redrawing anything.
The object can be whatever the idea needs: carried heads, a giant inflatable, a mascot costume, a kinetic sculpture, or a projection on a building after dark, with the same characters animated. They are designed together, so what goes up on the wall is the same character as the one in the street.
Everything in the box
WHAT THE PACKAGE COVERS
formats to choose from
Five
travel crate
One
character artwork
Full
weeks, brief to day
6–8
and customs handled
Freight
of reuse
Years
One frame, one argument
Why a Cartoonist Designs This
A political cartoon and a publicity stunt photograph do the same job. You get about a second of someone’s attention, and if the picture needs explaining you have already lost them.
Oddtoe drew editorial cartoons at college in Delaware, then worked as political cartoonist and chief designer for a Washington DC paper. Years of picking which single image a political story runs with, and watching an editor bin the ones that missed, usually for being too clever.
More recently, an illustration and cover design for a US House candidate’s fundraiser — a donkey bullying an elephant. Blunt, and it still reads printed small.
The same instinct decides what a stunt object should be. Out of twelve photographs from twelve actions, a news editor runs one. The job is to be that one.
It also decides what to leave out. A head that needs a caption has failed, and so does one that turns into a blob from across a square.
Where the money actually goes
Placards, a Stage, or Something Built?
A campaign budget usually has one line for the visible part of an action. This is what that line buys three different ways.
| Placards | A hired stage | Something built | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Cheap per unit, spent again every action | A large single-day hire | One build, spread over years |
| How long it lasts | One rally, if it does not rain | Gone by Monday morning | Years, in a crate between actions |
| What a news editor does | Scrolls past it | Crops it out of the frame | Runs it, because nothing else looks like it |
| Who has to operate it | Whoever is holding it | A crew and a technician | A few volunteers |
| What you own afterwards | Nothing | Nothing | The object and the character artwork |
Campaigns, PR agencies, unions, and NGOs
Who Commissions Work Like This?
Non-profits and NGOs, grassroots campaigns, unions, advocacy organisations, political campaigns, and PR agencies with a brand that wants a publicity stunt. What they all have is a date in the diary and something they need people to see.
Campaigns with a fixed date — a launch, a vote, a summit — need one day to produce a month of coverage.
Unions want objects that come out again and again, because the same members turn up several times a year.
NGOs and advocacy organisations need artwork that still works when volunteers in three cities are running it and there is no designer in the room. That means artwork files anyone can pick up.
Political campaigns buy artwork and objects the way they buy everything else. Oddtoe has done fundraiser illustration for a US House candidate.
Agencies working for any of the above are welcome too: see experiential marketing.
PR agencies, press teams, and campaigners...
Who Briefs This Work
Non-profits and foundations, political groups, and the staffers who run a member’s diary. PR agencies as well, whether the client is a campaign or a brand that wants a cheeky publicity stunt — plenty of this work arrives through a press team rather than the campaign itself.
If you already have someone on press, I work to them. They know the outlets and the timing. I build the thing that gives them a picture worth sending, and the two get planned together from the first week.
The bit that is not a service
Why Oddtoe Likes a Stunt
Street art is punk rock for visual artists. You do not need a gallery or a commission or anyone’s permission, and it gets seen by people who never decided to look at art that day.
That is most of why this subject grabs me. A head carried down a street is doing the same job as a paste-up on a wall at four in the morning — putting the argument where people actually are.
I make my own work as well as client work, and sculpture street art is where I want to take that next. So when a publicity stunt brief comes in, it is about the closest thing to what I would be making anyway.
The practical upside for a campaign is that the person designing the object has a stake in whether it works. I want the photograph to be good for the same reason you do.
Cane frame, paper skin, one pole...
Designed to be Carried »
Crated, certified, and shipped...
« Built to Travel Easily
Questions about
Publicity stunts?
Interested in seeing more…
built work?
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A church renovation with a sense of humor.
Tell me the date and what the picture has to say.
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