Moment marketing is a strategy wherein organizations utilize a current/viral event to engage with their audience to fetch maximum benefits of the heightened attention and emotions. July 16, 2025, witnessed such a viral moment in the form of a Kiss cam Coldplay fiasco that opened Pandora’s box of memes and moment marketing agencies to fetch the maximum benefits out of it. While popular brands like Amul, IKEA, etc. built their advertisements around this event, social media went berserk with the flood of memes. Astronomer launched its own unique response campaign to pivot this elevated attention for its Brand Building and deflecting negative PR. The current study analyzes various print advertisements of multiple Brands revolving around the Coldplay incident and compares them with the Astronomer’s popular pivoting advertisement featuring Gwyneth Paltrow. The study does a broad Multimodal Content Analysis of the Astronomer’s moment marketing video, with the advertisement campaigns led by certain other brands. The basic signifier and signified relationship, color choices, word choices, and design choices have been analyzed to fetch useful branding and PR lessons from the viral case. While Astronomer’s strategy has been successful in pivoting from the negative PR. Other brands tried to jump on the bandwagon of moment marketing, but a lack of sensitivity and design nuance didn’t provide them the expected publicity; rather, it initiated a spiral of their own negative PR.

Authors:
Swatantra A, Indian Institute of Management Indore, India

About the Presenter(s)
Swatantra is an Associate Professor in the Communication Area at Indian Institute of Management, Indore. During last two decades of her teaching career, she has been teaching courses related to Oral, Written, Persuasive and Nonverbal Communication.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/swatantra-33931111/

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