Anatomy of a Campaign

Spring 2015: an engineering story is making a big splash in the media – on both sides of the pond.

The occasion is the driving of an autonomous car, developed by Michigan’s leading global automotive supplier Delphi, from San Francisco to New York City. It’s a classic US road trip.

But as the car wends its way across the country on a 3,400-mile journey, there is nothing traditional about the driver, because there isn’t one. The Audi

Q5 crossover has all the usual mod cons on board – and a whole load of extras, including advanced radars, sensors and television cameras, enabling the car to navigate autonomously.

For Delphi, the automotive supplier headquartered in the heart of the US car industry in Detroit, the feat is the culmination of 15 years of development work which, it hopes, may see driverless cars becoming a feature on US highways at the end of the decade. Tech giants such as Google and Tesla Motors, the electric car company, are also keen. At

the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2014, the driverless Audi did what it was meant to do when two drunk men fell in front of it – it avoided them and parked. In future, large numbers of driverless cars may make highway driving much safer.

Americans love their cars, so the sci-fi element to the autonomous road-trip story made it a relatively easy sell, says Amy Messano, a former Microsoft executive who runs Delphi’s marketing and communications from Detroit. She says the drive was not a publicity stunt,

Delphi’s unforgettable road tripAn engineering firm’s driverless car travelled 3,400 miles across the US. Does the campaign signal a new era for manufacturing comms?BY BEN HARGREAVES. ILLUSTRATION BY NEIL STEVENS

ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN

38 Q1 2016 INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK

38-41 anatomycopy.indd 38 13/01/2016 15:52

but led by engineering research, with the aim of gathering data on how the driverless Audi would perform in real-world driving conditions.

“For us to be able to go along on the trip was a PR person’s dream, because the technology is so cool,” she says. For Delphi, it meant the opportunity to engage with its customers – original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) – as well as the public. Messano admits that, for an automotive supplier, “being perceived as relevant can be tough”.

But Delphi executives recognised the trip could yield an array of add-on benefits, particularly in terms of employee engagement for Delphi’s workforce, spread across the globe, and for recruitment, where the company competes for engineers against the likes of Apple and Google.

In terms of publicity, the public-relations offensive included short-notice campaigns in mainstream and social media, and roundtables for journalists with Delphi’s chief technology officer, Jeff Owens. Messano also went on the

journey with a camera crew. The Audi was branded as Delphi Automotive and a special section was placed on the company’s website about the autonomous drive.

During the trip Messano acted, she says, as “engineer-translator”, converting the pronouncements of the engineering team into tweets and other material readily understandable by the public. She says the chief engineer taught her about robotics and she spent time “teaching him about marketing”.

Videos tracking the team’s progress

INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q1 2016 39


40 Q1 2016 INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK

were posted online. Messano adds: “The aim was to show how the technology works. We broke down a complex system into: ‘What does this mean for you and me? What problems does this solve?’” The engineering team, meanwhile, picked up three terabytes of data to be fed into future product development. “It was an excellent opportunity for us to establish a thought-leadership advantage in the autonomous driving space,” she says.

The technology for advanced active safety in automotive, including radar, advanced sensors and a sophisticated electronic architecture, is there now, she explains: the challenge is bringing the cost of driverless cars down. Urban autonomous driving is highly complex but autonomous highway driving is on the horizon. “Detroit and Silicon Valley are converging,” says Messano. “We are at the centre of those two worlds.”

The driverless car campaign last spring, she adds, was a career highlight. “It was one of the most successful campaigns, one of the most meaningful.” The results included 900 articles, 250 broadcasts, a high level of engagement with schools and colleges, 186,000 views of Delphi’s YouTube channel dedicated to the event, and 72,000 minutes watched. “For an automotive supplier, that’s a big deal,” says Messano. There is probably no better way to enjoy a cross-US road trip than in a car when you don’t have to drive, of course.

And there was a serious point too, she adds: “It was very noticeable how many people were texting or making calls while they were driving during the trip. That is the kind of thing that really

engineering activity with PR”. He says: “That was really important for us because it allowed us to do things that we were unable to do with a PR story. Once the engineers had had the opportunity to look at data from the drive, we were able to revisit the story with the global B2B automotive press.

“The fact that it was a genuine engineering exercise allowed us to take it deeper into the global automotive industry.” Outstanding imagery of the Delphi Automotive Audi in New York City helped sell the story, Gotch explains.

He believes that automotive industry public relations and marketing strategy need to be more closely aligned.

“I always encourage my people to take the Chartered Institute of Marketing exams.” There can be a tendency among automotive public relations professionals to view marketing as the “people who do the brochures”, he adds. “You don’t do PR because you want your clients to read about their products in magazines, you do it because you want it to improve their business.

“You have to understand what is going to make their business more successful, and the role of communications in achieving that,” he says.

Messano believes that modern communications should feature a three-pronged attack: earned media such as traditional broadcast and print, owned media such as company websites, and paid-for content (advertising).

ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN

THE PROBLEM WITH ENGINEERINGEngineering has an image problem, which is why stories like Delphi’s driverless car trek are important – but rare.

Although there is an improved perception of the manufacturing sector in Britain since the global financial crisis, in terms of its contribution to the

economy, there is still a long-standing problem among the public involving misunderstanding what engineers do, and a lack of recognition of their status. The manufacturing sector enjoyed little support from government for many years, and was perceived as dirty and old-fashioned.

Engineers continued to toil in the background.

Now, at a time of chronic skills shortages in the sector, the time bomb manifests itself in ways that could prevent the industry ever achieving its potential. The number of women engineers in the UK, for example, is the lowest in the EU, at 8%.

compromises safety, and driverless cars could ultimately make that safe.”

She adds that it was obvious that, “most people speed – and we didn’t speed. There were observations I made on this trip that were not as an engineer but to do with how people drive.”

The story was a big deal for Delphi’s technology public relations agency in Britain, too. Richard Gotch, a graduate engineer, has been running Banbury’s Market Engineering, a specialist business-to-business technology marketing agency, since the mid-1990s, and counts Delphi Automotive as a long-standing client. He says the Delphi driverless-car campaign illustrated the power of integrating an “actual

More engineers should enter public

relations... they forget that they have interesting

things to sayRICHARD GOTCH


INFLUENCE.CIPR.CO.UK Q1 2016 41

THE UNTOLD STORY OF MANUFACTURINGDr Tim Fox, head of energy and the environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), says that the “general interest of the press in engineering is limited”. Media interest tends to focus on coverage of disasters, prior to official investigations. “The second dimension occurs if there is a topic that affects jobs or the economy, such as the closure of a steelworks or investment in nuclear power or high-speed rail,” he adds.

Problems in the British steel industry, investment in Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear power station to be built since the mid-1990s, and the visit of Chinese premier Xi Jinping to the UK in October perfectly illustrated this type of convergence.

Fox has worked hard to combine technology and engineering researchwith media campaigns on global issues including development and sustainability. “Engineering has to sit within a context that is really of interest to the public,” he points out, “such as food security or population growth.”

Countries in which engineering enjoys a higher profile, such as India and South Africa, and where engineers have a higher status – Germany is typically cited – appear

to enjoy much better press and a far better profile for manufacturing.

Fox says: “There is a greater interest in engineering-based stories in the media in India, reflecting the fact that engineering enjoys a higher status there.”

Fox has earned a reputation as a savvy and articulate media commentator who also happens to be a brilliant technologist. But communicators in the industry who can do both seem to be rare.

Or, as Richard Gotch, managing director of Market Engineering, says: “There seems to be a dearth of recognisable spokespeople for manufacturing: just compare it to the car industry.”

“The real golden ticket is to combine those three. The place for honest, unbiased journalism will always be there. It is integral, but there is an opportunity to combine it with other channels. I have a small budget so I need all three, including social media, which has transformed the communications industry.”

Of course, there is no substitute for a good story in the first place. “This was a genuine story. The origins were 100% in research. Engineers really wanted to gather data when this car performed to see how it could be developed,” explains Messano. “They needed to see how it would react in different situations.

“You can test, test and test again in the lab. But until you really get out into real-world situations, it’s hard to tell the difference. And people see through public relations exercises easily today.”

Gotch says that Market Engineering, which has a staff of 10, tends to compete with the in-house internal and external communications teams at large companies. Smaller technology businesses may not recognise the value of public relations at all, or claim they cannot get involved due to confidentiality issues.

“Engineers can be far too close to their own specialisation and they forget that they have really interesting things to say, and an excellent understanding of the trends that drive the industry,” he explains. Thought leadership is a useful tool in this context because if there is not much news that can be made public, engineers offer good value when theorising on the future direction of technology. But former engineers within companies doing public relations, who do not understand it, can hamper its potential, Gotch believes. “Marketing executives like Amy [Messano of Delphi] understand that public relations plays a role in recruitment, it brings new people into the business, and helps with investor relations as well as sales. You can work through the key audiences for the business. But more engineers should enter public relations and marketing too.”

Gotch says there is still a reasonable number of “extremely good” one-man-band public relations agencies in the manufacturing sector in Britain. “But they are the same people who were around 20 years ago.”

They can be too product-focused, he believes, with less understanding of HRand issues such as investor

relations and crisis management. There are lots of small firms in the engineering industry that have fantastic technology, but need public relations to attract investment to grow, he adds.

“They need to be able to understand how to attract business angels or investors in a year’s time. We can help them do that,” says Gotch.

Robin Weston is responsible for marketing the additive-manufacturing division (also known as 3D printing) at leading British engineering firm

Renishaw. It is an example of an engineering technology company that has enjoyed a supernova of hype over the past couple of years by manufacturing industry standards.

British credentials as innovators are never in question, says Weston. “We are great at having good ideas in Britain. We are a terrifically innovative nation. But when it comes to putting some horsepower into financing and implementation, we are too slow out of the blocks.

“Somebody in another country will see our bright idea and make a faster and better job of commercialising it.” We could start by telling stories as striking as Delphi’s.

Ben Hargreaves is a manufacturing and engineering journalist, and deputy editor of the UK Manufacturing Review. He worked as an editor for the IMechE for almost 10 years and reported twice from the war in Afghanistan

Dr Tim Fox, IMechE

Amy Messano, VP of marketing and comms, Delphi


Documents

Anatomy of a Campaign