CEO swimming stunt drives winning viral PR campaign

The best PR stunts are the ones that don’t cost thousands of dollars to stage, and have a bit of wit about them. Opera Software, the Oslo-based creator of a Web browser alternative to Internet Explorer, pulled off a cheap-and-fun stunt that even roped the company’s PR manager into the story.

Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner announced that if the company’s new version of its browser was downloaded at least 1 million times within the first four days of its mid-April launch, he’d swim from Norway to the U.S.—with a stopover in Iceland for some hot chocolate at his mother’s house.