Creativity, Consistency, Content: How Ford of Europe Are Reimagining Media Relations

Fifteen years ago, the automotive PR world was a much simpler place.

Brands launched cars. Brands took journalists to large hotel complexes and talked them through the features of said cars, before letting them drive them and perhaps serving up a sandwich or two. The journalists then dutifully wrote reviews for publication in magazines or papers. Consumers read the magazines or newspapers, perhaps briefly ruminated on the review, then promptly threw it away (or meticulously stock-piled copies in the spare room, if you’re anything like my father...)

However, much like the Bolly-fuelled lunches of fashion PR’s halcyon days, this process is a thing of the past. The automotive communications industry has had to move on and adapt to a world where news is instant, content lives forever, and thanks to social media, every consumer with a smartphone can be as influential as a journalist.

So what does the modern media drive look like?

At Foxtrot Papa, we’ve spent the last year working with a brilliant team of clients and creative partners to help Ford of Europe launch models ranging from the Focus ST to the Ranger Raptor, in locations as far flung as the north of Sweden or coast of Morocco. To understand how and why their approach has changed, I caught up with our client Stéphane Cesareo, product launch director for Ford of Europe Communications. Here are his top tips for running a successful media drive in the digital age:

1. Think Experience

Today’s automotive communications teams are operating in an increasingly competitive climate. Not only are they competing for coverage in a more saturated news cycle, but their end audience - the consumer - is also bombarded with huge volumes of content on a daily basis. Both of these factors mean that a ‘classic’ drive is no longer a guarantee of impactful sales.

In order to cut through the noise, Cesareo believes that brands must offer experiences to the media that are so compelling to them, “they take their audiences on the same exciting journey". This means that regardless of whether they have 10 guests or 1000 guests present, brands need to make every individual feel as though they’ve had a 1-1 encounter with the car.

“Don’t think of the event as having one narrative,” he explains. “Think of it as the starting point for multiple stories, carrying the same key messages with different angles depending on the guests’ audience or readership, and of course their experience of your car.”

The onus is on communications teams to offer immersive experiences that recreate more different driving situations than ever before - showcasing not just the car itself, but the design, technology, connectivity, safety and entertainment features. In practice, this might be something as simple as curating a personalised playlist for each car that is pre-synced to the entertainment system. Conversely, it might also mean allowing guests to test the car’s ability to tackle icy conditions by driving it on a frozen lake, or experience off-road capabilities by dune-hopping or rock-crawling.

The shift in thinking from media ‘drive’ to media ‘experience’ is also made more urgent by the fact that thanks to the advancement of technology, the ‘driving experience’ is becoming an increasingly key point of product differentiation. In the PR sphere, automotive journalists and influencers are the front line of communicating that experience to the end consumer. As more electric vehicles hit the market place, engaging them with these products in new, creative ways will only become more important.

2. Make every touch point consistent

“Consistency is not just about the logistics of a media drive,” explains Cesareo. “It has to encompass all visual elements.”

In a world where your guests can potentially live stream every minute of their encounter with your car - posting pictures, tweeting observations and sharing the information you provide them throughout - it’s vital that each visual element of your media drive is consistent with your broader product positioning.

Every touch point doesn’t just need to be consistent with what your brand stands for, it also needs to encapsulate the product’s identity - the spirit and purpose of the vehicle - and relay product information in a digestible, easily shareable way.

Why? The more you invite your guests to create personal stories around their encounter with the car, the harder it becomes to ensure your key product messages are relayed to the end consumer. By ensuring a consistency both aesthetically and in messaging, you mitigate confusion and ensure that all assets which find their way online are consistent with one another.

Of course, this makes the job of the communications team even more complicated, because every single touchpoint needs to be strategically thought through. This is where agencies like Foxtrot Papa come in - helping to brand and curate ‘Instagrammable moments’ that trigger massive social share, whilst bringing strategic and creative rigour to the creation of every brand asset.

3. Build a content ecosystem

What does that creative and strategic rigour look like? At Ford, it’s called a content ‘ecosystem.’

Thanks to social media, guests’ (and their audience’s) encounter with a new model starts long before they arrive at the media drive itself. Every touch point from the invite to the travel itinerary has the potential to be shared with followers on twitter or Instagram and as such, becomes an opportunity to surprise, delight and inform. “That’s why we create launch videos up front,” Cesareo explains. “To set the mood for what is to come, share key product messaging and create excitement among a journalists’ readers or followers for their upcoming review.”

And what of the event itself? “It used to be enough just to take a set of nice pictures of the car and send them to the media a few days later,” recalls Cesareo. Today, the shift from print to online media has made consumers impatient, with publishers now expected to turn around content in a matter of hours not days. As a result, communications teams now need to turn press assets around at very high speed. What’s more, due to shortening attention spans and a preference for increasingly visual online content, they also need to provide journalists with more assets - photos, infographics, B-roll - than ever before.

Ford’s approach to delivering these high volumes of highly visual content at speed is two-fold. On the one hand, they ensure that their creative partners have editors on site to turn around film and social assets as soon as the video is captured. However, they also push guests to tell original stories by rigging each of the cars with go-pros and providing personalised edits of each and every drive for social media.

Ultimately, it’s this personal touch that wins that reaps the highest rewards, because audiences get so much more than a clinical review of the pros and cons of Ford’s latest model. They get an intimate insight into the driving experience. 

Hannah Baker is marketing and new business director at Foxtrot Papa