Deep inside the early days of the viral era. And what they taught me about survival tomorrow.
Part agency confessional, part gritty memoir, part mindset roadmap for ambitious communicators and the entire creative class.
Here is what you can expect to learn from reading this book:
A crash course in maximizing your creative mindset.
Detailed strategies that media can’t ignore.
Ways to extend PR campaigns past their normal limits.
Develop a love affair with words and ideas.
Proven real-life tactics to help leverage stories into buzz campaigns.
“Top 10 Successful Marketing Stunts”
“Guerrilla Publicists”
“Campaign of the Week”
About the Author
Darren Shuster came out of the UCLA doctoral program in the mid‑1990s, after a formative run in Washington, D.C. working inside foreign embassies, on Capitol Hill, and publishing guerrilla warfare research. He went on to build and define the category of Pop Culture PR, a consumer media relations agency headquartered in Los Angeles with outposts in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, London, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Shuster has engineered high‑impact publicity for celebrities and brands including Phil Mickelson, Starbucks, Ancestry.com, UFC World Champion Cris “Cyborg” Justino, and a rogue cast of online gambling pioneers such as GoldenPalace.com and BoDog.com. His counter‑intuitive, headline‑grabbing tactics helped shape an era when “viral” had nothing to do with COVID.
From poker‑playing monkeys and town re‑namings to turning a suburban house into the world’s first “homevertisement” for a Swedish telecom company, the agency has reached hundreds of millions of people and helped define the early playbook for viral, pop culture PR.
Shuster has been featured by outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, TMZ, Entrepreneur, ESPN, and PRWEEK. Today, he blends his intelligence background and his agency ride to advise brands on narrative warfare, reputation risk, and the next wave of hypercreative campaigns.
