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On Sunday, October 19, 2025, thieves mounted a daring daylight break in at the Louvre in Paris. At 9:30am local time, thieves disguised as construction workers extended a long motorized furniture ladder with a bucket up to a balcony. To passing pedestrians and motorists, nothing seemed amiss. It looked like yet another maintenance project at the Louvre. The thieves climbed into the motorized bucket and silently raised it up the ladder to the balcony, where they smashed a window. Once inside, they cut into the display cases, grabbing eight pieces of the crown jewels worth 88 million euros. Then they jumped back into the bucket, lowered it down the ladder to the street, and escaped on scooters. Total time inside the Louvre four minutes. It was a brazen and shocking robbery. News of the heist spread like wildfire around the world. While news of the robbery stunned the public, it was particularly fascinating to a certain German company called Booker. As they watched the news footage, they suddenly noticed something and zoomed in. That's when they realized the motorized furniture ladder the thieves had used and left behind was in fact made by their company. It was a Booker Agilo furniture ladder that made the news doubly shocking to them. But once they realized no one was hurt in the robbery, they decided to take advantage of the story by using a little humor. The very next day, the Booker company created an ad. It featured a photo of the actual Booker furniture ladder leaning up against the Louvre balcony. The headline said, the next time you need things to move quickly. The ad went on to say, the Booker Agilo transports your treasures weighing up to 400 kilograms at 42 meters a minute. Whisper quiet thanks to its electric motor. They placed that ad on social media. Booker says the response to the newsjacking was overwhelming. The company's Instagram and Facebook pages usually reach around 15,000 people. That ad reached 1.7 million, and 99% of the reactions were positive. It was a crown jewel example of newsjacking. The Louvre heist story went viral. The story was relevant to the Booker brand. The latter company had moved quickly while the story was hot, and the resulting ad gained a lot of attention. The British Geographical Survey, or bgs, is an organization that monitors earthquakes across the uk. As a rule, the organization doesn't get much press, and it might be fair to say the general public isn't overly familiar with the BGs. But not long ago, the organization jumped on a viral news story. The BGS maintains a network of seismic instruments around the United Kingdom. These instruments are very sophisticated and sensitive and can detect even small ground motions. Typically, the BGS detects about 300 small earthquakes a year in the UK, but only 30 are of a high enough magnitude to be felt by humans. As it Happened on Friday, June 7, 2024, Taylor Swift was performing at the Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh, Scotland. She performed there three nights in a row and during all three concerts the British Geographical Survey registered seismic movement. That seismic movement came from the audiences at the Taylor Swift concerts. The BGS put out a news release stating that Taylor Swift's fans made the earth move. While I've talked about Swift quakes before, the British Geographical Survey Organization went one step further. It actually calculated which songs caused the biggest commotion. Taylor Swift shows are precisely timed and exquisitely choreographed, so every show runs at exactly the same time intervals every night. Therefore, the seismic spikes occurred at the same points every night. One of the volcanologists from the BGS attended the Swift concerts and took photos and videos of each song, which then allowed the BGS to cross reference when seismic spikes happened in relation to the timestamps on the photos. So according to the British Geographical Survey Organization, the following three Taylor Swift songs created the most seismic Cruel Summer, Ready for It, and Champagne Problems. Those were the songs that caused the 73,000 nightly fans to dance, cheer, and and stomped the most. The Swifties generated 8 kilowatts or 80,000 watts of power, and the largest movement of the earth wasn't actually during a song. It occurred during the four minutes of applause after the song Champagne Problems. That particular movement was detected by two different monitoring stations, the furthest being 6km or 3.7 miles away. It was kind of a seismic moment for the BGS as its news story got shared around the world. Back in 2016, news of a certain Hollywood divorce took international media by storm, and it wasn't just any Hollywood couple. It was Hollywood royalty. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were splitting up. The split consumed gossip magazines, newspaper column inches, and TV screens. That was when Norwegian Airlines decided to newsjack the conversations that were taking place around water coolers, coffee shops and offices around the world. To promote Norwegian Airlines low fare from Oslo to Los Angeles, it ran a large ad in newspapers. The ad simply said Brad is single Oslo to Los angeles one way £169. It was a very funny quick response to the news of the breakup. It also demonstrated how nimble Norwegian Airlines is. I don't think big North American Airlines could move that fast or be that bold. Norwegian Airlines says it has a challenger brand mentality, meaning they're not afraid to disrupt the industry and shake up the status quo. They gain market share by being bold. And the Brad is single ad was perfectly in keeping with Norwegian Airlines established cheeky brand character. Not only did that news jacking get the airline a lot of business, it became a news item around the world. When we come back, a pizza company newsjacks the wrong hashtag.
