Rick Justus Seeks to Dethrone Sir Richard Branson, the Undisputed King of the Publicity Stunt

Rick Justus has decided to go to greater extremes to advertise the various companies that fall under his umbrella brand to realize his seemingly limitless ambition.

“We have created new industries, disrupted old ones, and continually perform miracles for our clients,” says Rick Justus. “In my many years in Asia I always prioritized and prided myself on our PR, and it’s generally worked well for us. Now it’s time for me to do this in the U.S. and around the world.”

Japan will never forget the time Rick Justus rode a 9-foot unicycle on a stage to bring visibility to his brand. This event made the news.

He made the news again when he broke the 100-meter unicycle speed record.

A life-size picture of Rick showed up in the bullet train stations across Japan when he chose to advertise Kakegawa’s green tea.

In launching more than 50 businesses in Myanmar, he made the news again when he stood up and taught hundreds of people how to eat a hamburger the American way.

There was the time he jumped on top of a van with a megaphone to rally several thousand villagers to embrace entrepreneurship. This made local news and spread through word of mouth.

Rick leveraged a televised beauty pageant to get a bunch of investors, mostly Japanese, to a remote province in the Philippines. After these investors got to be the official judges for the beauty pageant, he shuttled them to a boat to take them to a sandbar in the Hundred Islands to wine and dine them. Rick leveraged this unforgettable experience to raise more than $1 billion. When he tells this story, he still smiles because he used the fact that the sandbar disappears under water to create urgency.

Then there are the failed PR stunt attempts. On one of his trips to India, he was seconds away from being stoned to death and, upon barely escaping with his life, he was arrested and put in jail deep in the jungles for being in an area foreigners weren’t allowed to be.

His trip to the Himalayas was meant to be one of his greatest PR stunts and leveraged to make it to the Olympics. Instead, he got lost for three weeks and 1,100 kilometers in the Everest region.

Sir Richard Branson has been called “the undisputed king” of the publicity stunt, and Rick Justus seeks to dethrone him.

“I have no shame in saying Sir Richard Branson is my chief inspiration. I have the utmost respect for the guy, and during a dark decade, he was one who inspired me to keep going and build a globally recognized and trusted brand.”

Here is a side-by-side comparison of Sir Richard Branson and Rick Justus through some of the greatest PR stunts they’ve ever undertaken.

10. Sir Richard dressed in a wedding dress for his Virgin Brides Venture. Rick officiated more than 1,800 weddings in Japanese and was televised for 6 years.

9. Sir Richard jumped off Palms Hotel Casino to celebrate Virgin American Flight. Rick jumped off a crane to advertise a client’s business in Phuket, Thailand.

8. Sir Richard posed as a Zulu Warrior to celebrate flights to South Africa. Rick danced with naked tribal villagers naked, and intentionally decided not to leverage this stunt.

7. Sir Richard flung a model over his back to launch Virgin Media. Rick dropped his briefcase and, in a suit and tie, got down in the sumo position with the famous sumo wrestlers of Japan pretending he was going to wrestle them.

6. Sir Richard drove a tank down Fifth Avenue to launch Virgin Cola. Rick had a police entourage to escort him and his motley dream team to the Royal Palace during a time of war.

5. Sir Richard bared his butt to mark the arrival of Virgin Atlantic in Canada. Rick bared his butt and his entire naked body more times than he cares to admit, and never sought to leverage this to launch one of his companies or on behalf of one of the 21,000 clients he’s helped over the past 33 years.

4. Sir Richard dressed as Birdman in the Bognor Birdman event. Rick has had special encounters with angels. He calls his wife an angel. “I think Sir Richard has me beat on this one,” says Rick.

3. Sir Richard set a world record for crossing the English Channel from Dover to Calais, France in an amphibious car. Rick paid three people a year’s wages to escort him through shark-infested waters to remote marble quarries. His boat nearly capsized. This stunt helped improve the economic wellbeing of a nation, but it didn’t make the news and Rick had to bribe his way out of the country.

2. Sir Richard arrived in a spacesuit for a press conference launching Virgin Galactic. Rick received a ton of testimonials from leaders, including a Virgin CEO, for the book he co-authored with Monique Justus called The 20Y Formula: The Economic Holy Grail. Simply, this little audacious book shows the reader how to get from here to there twenty years faster (aka Time Travel). King & Justus is solving abundance for humanity by focusing on children, CEOs, companies, cities, countries, and the new celestial frontier.

1. Sir Richard is brave in the seat of a hot air balloon. Rick must simply convince his friend in the ballooning business to help him.

Here’s one more for good measure. Sir Richard appeared in an episode of Baywatch. Rick appeared in an episode of Relative Race.

“Sir Richard Branson has clearly done a better job than me at leveraging PR stunts to boost the brand’s profile,” says Rick Justus. “I wasn’t building a brand like him in the past. My PR stunts were for my clients. The exciting news is that now I am. We’re doing far too many extraordinary things to stay quiet.”

Rick has the right idea, and you can expect to see him use his fame and familiar face to put his King & Justus companies squarely in the spotlight time and time again.