 |
 |
 n 1914 when Henry Ford doubled his workers’ wages overnight from the then average $2.50 a day to $5, The Wall Street Journal accused him of “the most foolish thing ever attempted in the industrial world.” They thought it would destroy the economy. He ignored them — and absenteeism in his automobile factory dropped by 2000 percent and productivity rose by almost a fifth. When Ford cut the price of the Model T so low the profits were sliced in half, his staff warned him it could ruin the company. He ignored them, and soon half the cars on Earth were Model Ts. As “Crazy Henry” knew, sometimes the best way to live by the rules is to drive right over them.
Case in point: Last November, with the 2003 North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit just eight weeks away, the marketing folks at Ford faced a challenge worthy of their founder’s problem-solving genius. The problem this time? How to capture the attention of the media long enough to pitch stories about Ford’s 100th anniversary and its hydrogen-fueled cars of the future.
The obstacles? For starters, today, the world is full of innovative new car designs and exciting car companies with newsworthy stories. Ford had to compete with more than 30 of the world’s top automakers (2,000 companies in all from the automotive industry) who were introducing a record 61 new vehicles at the show, including 10 hybrids, and 6,700 journalists with their own ideas, agendas, and deadlines.
Challenges like these are not unique to Ford. Sooner or later every company faces a similar obstacle course when staging events: How do you find ways to stand out from competitors? How do you get the attention of an overworked and jaded media? How do you make your event a thrill ride instead of a Sunday drive with Grandma?
Ford’s answer was to break the rules of public relations. Here’s what they did, and how they did it. |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
By displaying museum-like graphics and antique cars, Ford reinforces their corporate stability from past to the present. |
|
 |
|
Ford steers media attention to the company’s future with the hydrogen-powered Ford FC Focus. |
|
 |
|
Classic cars, like this ’55 Thunderbird, reminded reporters
of Ford's place in American automotive history. |
|
|
 Hold your event in a generic site.
Ford’s Rule: Find a venue that says “you.”
Typically press venues are sterile, expensive, and anti-brand. But there are other venues that actually reinforce a company’s brand, which in Ford’s case, is its legacy of innovation. They’re just not as easy to find.
Imagine the surprise, then, when someone at Ford remembered a vital but completely neglected piece of Ford history — the company’s long lost and forgotten Piquette Avenue Plant — the factory where Henry Ford invented and manufactured the Model T that would be heralded as the Car of the Century. In other words, they uncovered the factory where the Model T and the modern auto industry were born. Not a bad spot for a press release.
Located in Detroit’s famed “Auto Alley” — the plant had been sold to Studebaker in 1911, to the 3M Company in the 1930s, and then to a series of other owners over the years. Losing track of Piquette was like forgetting the garages where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made the first Apple computer, or where Hewlett-Packard started their Fortune 500 company.
The decision to hold the press event at Piquette gave the company a competitive edge no one could match.
The three-story, 450-by-60-foot structure “looks like a New England woolen mill because no one knew what an automobile factory should look like,” says Dave Scully, Ford’s manager of global product development-events, “because there were no automobile factories then.” Last used for manufacturing perhaps 50 years ago, the Piquette Plant “still had the original floors, original ceiling, original lighting, and the original peeling paint,” says Scully. “There were old time cards still in there. Stenciled ‘No Smoking’ signs hung on the wall. There was even an old summary of wages.”
Early in 1907 Ford walled off a secret 12-by-15-foot “Experimental Room” in the northwest corner of the third floor of the plant and stuck a lock on the door. While the rest of the company thought it was just a storeroom, Ford and his engineers feverishly scratched drawings and numbers on a chalkboard in his war room. He sat in his mother’s rocking chair and studied racing cars, sketches, and rough drafts. On Sept. 27, 1908, the first Model T — the Tin Lizzie — rolled off the production line. It was a 1,200-pound, four-cylinder, 20 horsepower engine that got Ford so revved up when he tried to take the prototype out of the factory for a spin, legend has it an assistant had to take over the wheel.
It was that same pedal-to-the-metal excitement the Ford marketing team hoped to whip up with the Piquette Avenue Plant.
 Keep your event close by.
Ford Rule: Park it somewhere else.
Most companies hold press events in or near the convention facility, and for good reason: Trade show attendees, especially journalists, like everything nearby. They’re on deadline and they need to make the maximum number of stops in the minimum amount of time.
Ford’s rivals are no different. “Chrysler had an event going at the same time,” says Scully. “So did Mercedes-Benz and General Motors. And there were dozens of press conferences at the show. So why get lost in the crowd?"
Ford put conventional wisdom in reverse by inviting journalists to take a tour of the Piquette Avenue Plant, nearly four miles from Cobo Center. Of the 6700 print and broadcast journalists at the show, Ford hand picked nearly 600 of what Scully called “the centers of influence in the media” for a cocktail party. The select group included ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, Warner Brothers, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Car & Driver, Road & Track, and others. (The 600 number was based on how many they could safely accommodate in the building.)
Even the journey to the event on the first day was, well, eventful. Ford packed the 600 reporters into motorcoaches and 11 reproduction Model Ts owned by local car buffs, and chauffeured them from the show at Cobo Center to the Piquette Avenue Plant. The caravan of classic cars was itself an event covered by the local media.
 Focus On the Future.
Ford Rule: Tell them how great you used to be.
Ordinarily, the last thing a smart marketing company does is focus on the past. It can look like a company is admitting is has nothing new to offer, or that its best days can be seen in the rear-view mirror.
But Ford used its “back to the future” tour to demonstrate its forward-thinking vision. By reminding reporters of its 100 years of innovation — starting with a car that 15 million drove, from President Wilson to Charles Lyndbergh — and then introducing its new high-tech future car that gets 100 miles between refills and emits almost zero pollutants, it gave reporters a story no other company could duplicate. “We wanted an event that would both tie in to our centennial in 2003 and the experimental Ford Focus,” says Scully. |
|
 |
|
|
|
 Keep it clean.
Ford Rule: Keep it natural.
In 2000 a non-profit group called The Model T Automotive Heritage Complex (T-PLEX) took over the plant with the hope of restoring it, “But there were no lights. It didn’t have any heat, and there was no plumbing,” says Scully. It was a dump that had been deserted for decades. Raccoons rummaged and pigeons pecked where factory workers on the prototype of the assembly line had once churned out 12,000 of the cars writer E. B. White called “the miracle God had wrought.”
Plus, the clock was running down. By the time Ford had hired Treehouse Events, whose parent company is Exhibit Works Inc., based in Livonia, MI, to coordinate the event, there were just six weeks and counting until the Auto Show.
Ford and Treehouse carpooled a team of preservation architects, structural engineers, and contractors to the plant. They added external fire escapes and strengthened the freight elevator to carry guests and cars to the third floor, where the event would be held over two nights. They boarded up the windows and snaked the building with black tubing, through which a heated gel passed to warm the space. They trucked in restrooms in trailers outside and set up catering facilities in an adjacent building. The room where Ford brainstormed the Model T was marked off by a simple but stark wall of 2-by-4s.
The dirt and disrepair gave the Ford press team another rule to break to their advantage. Unlike other events that often place a premium on cleanliness and elegance, they didn’t make it museum-y clean and ordered. “We didn’t recreate what it looked like 100 years ago. It was 100 years ago and we kept it that way,” says Treehouse president Dave Dekker.
Once journalists arrived at the plant, they went by elevator to the third floor and wandered around the 1 1/2 football field-long factory. They explored archival photos on freestanding canvases, a Quadracycle (a buggy you steered with a tiller), a 1903 Model A, a ‘55 Thunderbird, the hybrid Ford FC Focus (which may go on sale next year), and of course, a Model T. They ate white- and milk-chocolate molded Model Ts in the same space where Henry Ford developed the steel version.
The next night an elite group of about 180 journalists from the first night were in attendance. These were the Cadillacs of car journalists, the most influential reporters in the automotive industry who came for dinner and a chance to hobnob with company president William Ford and other Ford officials.
“The Ford event was authentic,” says Jack Keebler, Detroit bureau chief for Motor Trend magazine. “At Piquette, Ford created a powerful sense of permanence. The backdrop of the plant lent credibility to a company that’s had some rough times. It says ‘we’re here to stay.’”
Ford used a company called Millward Brown Precis that tracks media response. In this case, Precis monitored story content, column inches, photos, and more. “Our Precis rating was huge. We were 30 percent better than our nearest competitor,” says Scully. Ford also claims that its brands garnered the highest percentage of media coverage throughout the NAIAS.
Exhibitor magazine’s own survey of national press coverage showed that as much as three to six months after the show, articles with “Ford” and “hybrid” in the same paragraph still outnumbered “DaimlerChrysler” and “hybrid” by more than two to one. A search of Google News for “Ford and Centennial” found approximately 330 media stories.
And on the first night of the Piquette Avenue event, Ford held 600 journalists captive for four hours. On the second, Ford captivated an even more elite audience of reporters for three. That seven hour total compares to an estimated 20 minutes for the average press event at the Auto Show — or 21 times the normal captivity quotient.
None of the event’s success — and especially the rule-breaking road trip down memory lane — would have surprised Henry Ford. “You can’t build a reputation,” said the man who put America on wheels, “on what you are going to do." 
|
|
