Motor Show News Orgy

In the world of automotive communications, announcements about new products are 10 a penny and, with the Geneva Motor Show just around the corner this week, motoring noise has ramped up considerably.

But, even given the proximity of one of the world’s biggest car shows, something extraordinary happened recently.

On a Tuesday night at the end of February, somewhere around 11.30pm to 12.30am the next morning, details of three brand new sports / supercars were revealed to the world, all within that one, 60-minute period.

The Aston Martin Vantage GT3, new Audi R8 and Lotus Evora 400 were all unleashed on the world. At roughly the same time, Rolls Royce also announced it would be building an SUV for launch in 2018.

While this orgy of fabulous automotive news was a lot of fun (and a lot of writing) for motoring journalists across the globe, it raised the question in my head as to how and why these four brand leviathans ended up going head-to-head with each other. Was it a conscious decision on their parts to get into a street fight or a calamitous coincidence of embargo timing?

Traditional motoring PR wisdom suggests you look for a gap in the automotive news agenda, a space when there is less noise going on, allowing your story to be heard clearer and further.

That didn’t happen on this occasion.

In reality, what has happened here is that the brands involved had big stories to tell two weeks before the Geneva Motor Show and knew that Wednesday is publication day for both of the big weekly motoring mags in the UK. Maybe they also had one eye on the Asian market, which would be waking up around midnight GMT but lifting the embargo ready for Autocar and Auto Express to go live with the stories is the most likely explanation for the glut.

And it raises another question – why are manufacturers allowing the motor shows to dictate when they distribute their big stories? And indeed the methods used to launch a new product.

It happens every year – a fortnight before Geneva, Frankfurt / Paris and now Beijing / Shanghai, there is a veritable frenzy of big stories from a plethora of car makers. Many of them are entirely worthy of a front cover on the top mags but there can only be one winner if all the stories hit the editorial desks at the same time.

This was precisely the situation we had last week – a client of ours, the editor of What Car? magazine Jim Holder, confirmed that he’d have been happy for any of the Aston, Lotus, Audi and Rolls to have been on the cover of the weeklies last week. In the event, the Rolls scooped the big slot on the front of Autocar and Auto Express went with the Volvo XC90. All the other cars had to make do with front cover flashes or were relegated to the inside pages.

So why not wait until the show news blitz is out of the way? The problem is that, within the car makers, there is pressure from the business to go to the shows and to use them as platforms to launch important new vehicles, hence the timing of announcements being dictated and the aforementioned clots of big car news.

In reality, though, a big story is a big story whenever it lands with editorial teams and, if Aston had pumped out their GT3 story during the traditional mid-summer lull or the similar dip in activity post-New Year, they would not have suffered any loss of traffic or magazine sales generated but could have guaranteed themselves a front cover and a bigger slice of SOV.

Perhaps it’s time for the automotive industry to loosen the grip motor shows have on their product programmes in favour of better share of voice.

Or, as an alternative, a way to increase your SOV as a manufacturer could be to go ‘old skool’ with your show news. The standard MO these days is to tease what you’ve got at the show a month before, chuck more details out two weeks before and then set up camp on your stand. What that means for the motoring hack is that they already know what’s going to be on display before they even set foot on a plane. They’ve seen and run pictures of all the new product before the cars are polished up ready for the first guests.

A bold car maker could potentially bag some headlines by not saying anything about their plans for Geneva in advance and simply rocking up with something brand new and unexpected on the stand. It’s a gamble, as you’d not get the now-standard coverage in the lead up to the show and you’d potentially forfeit coverage in the monthly motoring mags who would consider it old news by the time their next issue comes out.

But, in a time when motor shows can be covered just as easily, if not easier, from a desk in a different country than by the legwork of the ardent car journo pounding the halls on site, something new that no-one was expecting would create buzz and an almost forgotten sense of excitement. It would surely be the talk of the show.

All of which makes it almost inexplicable that Volvo launched its XC90 and Mercedes its C63 AMG in the midst of the pre-Geneva craziness. The cars will doubtless be at GMS but everyone has already seen countless pictures, road test reviews and write-ups. Again, business pressures will almost certainly have dictated the timing of the press announcements but it makes little sense to this writer to have your story get lost in a pool of strong news stories.

As to who won the sportscar scrap?

Well, without having access to each manufacturer’s media monitoring service, Twitter is generally considered these days as a decent barometer of success and, in the 24 hours after details emerged of the four new vehicles, the results looked like this.

1. Audi R8 – 8,816 tweets
2. Rolls Royce SUV – 3,339
3. Aston Martin GT3 – 3,085
4. Lotus Evora 400 – 1,609

And a study of SOV over the week after the announcements were made also showed that Audi won the battle, securing 48% of the noise, with the Evora coming second with 28.1%.

I suppose the one admirable thing you can say about it all is that going head-to-head with every other car maker on the market does show unswerving faith in your own product against its rivals and that confidence filters through to customers.

But, with just 7.7% of the mentions made of these three new cars happening in relation to Geneva, Aston Martin, Audi and Lotus didn’t need to tie their news to this week’s Swiss car-fest. The Motor Show is no longer the force it once was.

Andy