The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Storytelling, Chapter Three: The Art of the Stunt

By Chris Terry

Vice President, Communications Strategy

Telemetry

The third habit of my “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Storytelling” underscores the “Art of the Stunt.” 

When I read “stunt,” I think “gimmick.” Many are. But think of a well-executed stunt like a specialty tool in the practitioner’s toolbox; you don’t use it often, but when you do, it can be deployed to great effect. Stunts aren’t without risk: poorly executed ones can hurt your reputation. Media may ignore your bid for newsmaking. But with great creativity and planning, a fantastic stunt can hit like a warm, sunny May day in a Michigan February.

Stunts that generate favorable earned media coverage are a long-standing tradition, especially in automotive. Ford ingeniously dismantled a 1965 Mustang and reassembled it on the Empire State Building observation deck. 1990s-era Chrysler pulled too many clever stunts to recount in the Bud Liebler/Tom Kowaleski/Jason Vines era (I worked for Bud and Jason at Stratacomm; those guys weren’t just good, they were fun as hell), like the Bob Lutz and then Mayor Coleman Young’s crashing through plate glass at the 1992 Detroit Auto Show, which remains a high-water mark. Chrysler upstaged everyone again for 2008’s new Ram pickup introduction, which was escorted to Cobo Hall by 120 Longhorn cattle (and inadvertently gave new meaning to the cowboy order to “mount up”).

To be fair, these cost serious money in out-of-pocket expenses and staff time. Let’s say you don’t have much of a budget, but management still needs to spotlight a new product or service without a big ad and marketing budget.  

To usurp an old adage: “When the PR going gets tough, the creatives get going.”

And so it was in early 2013. My client at Ford, Telemetry Founder Craig Daitch, then car communications manager (and my boss again today), needed to promote a genuinely innovative, fuel-efficient 1.0-liter three-cylinder EcoBoost engine that had already launched in Europe and was launching the U.S. Focus and Fiesta. 

The Little Stunt That Could

The wily Daitch had an idea: Would the engine — or the tiny engine block on my desk — pass through carry-on luggage screening at the airport? Craig called the TSA at Detroit Metro Airport and asked if they’d let us try running it through an airport X-ray scanner. “Sure, no problem; just come to the TSA checkpoint at the Marriott.”

So off went Craig, myself, and PR/content gunslinger Dan Mazei with the engine block in hand. TSA was surprisingly nonchalant about the affair, even amused. But we got the pictures that would tell the story, pitched the hell out of it, and the rest became a no-budget earned media legend in the annals of Ford Product Communications.

I can’t remember how many stories this generated, but it peppered our clipsheets for months, including a high-profile Lindsay Brooke piece in the New York Times, countless others in dailies like the Los Angeles Times, and many in the enthusiast press. Even the cynical couldn’t help but write the story.

You Don’t Need a Big Budget. You Need Creativity

Not having a budget is no excuse... but neither is being creatively bankrupt. By providing unexpected context to one of a thousand “innovation” stories that could have been told — and understanding what makes a story a story — the freethinkers then at Ford World Headquarters raised awareness of a compact car engine in the middle of the decades-long shift to SUVs. 

If you have a product or service that needs a boost, or a whole campaign and the creative juices aren’t flowing (or never budded on the vine), please reach out to us; we don’t have the overhead or billing structure of the big agencies. 

Next time you hear someone say, “Who thought of that?” you might say, “My agency and I dreamed that up.”

Thirteen years later, we still love this stuff and we’re still doing it.

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