How to capture some of Tesla’s automotive PR thunder: start aftermarket support for a Cybertruck that doesn’t yet exist

By Bill Hayward

Wrapping a Tesla Cybertruck might not be a world-changing innovation, but it's not too shabby as automotive PR,
Image: Wrapmate

Let me preface this by saying that I have nothing against automotive PR. In the automotive industry, public relations plays a valuable role—when it’s done well, since, of course, it is often done, um, not so well.

While there is no shortage of automotive media outlets competing for a share of the car enthusiast audience, the automotive industry—in its entirety, from the OEMs at the top to your tiny one-owner/mechanic service operator on the corner—generates a volume of news so immense that it’s impossible for any one outlet to serve the industry in its entirety.

There’s plenty of competition for the attention of automotive journalists, and that’s where good automotive PR comes in.

An automotive journalist is going to see a lot of “meh” in the inbox every day. We all have hungry content machines that need to be fed, and there’s always plenty of news to go around. But we also want to create stories that are compelling and interesting to readers and viewers.

That’s where the challenge lies. Many of the pitches come in are lean on true news—like a new model-year announcement in which the addition of a new color option is the only change in a generation of a car model that has grown tired over the years. Yawn.

Others are so thick with more or less random technical detail that it’s a challenge to cut through to the interesting story underneath—if there is one. This is often the case with certain European automakers that shall remain nameless.

But now and then, a pitch comes through that is so different that it grabs your attention, even if the story or the source might not be all that exciting. That’s exactly what happened when a pitch from a vehicle graphics vendor called Wrapmate landed in my inbox yesterday.

Was the approach of announcing that they are supporting the Tesla Cybertruck with vehicle wraps a little gimmicky?

You bet. If you’re in the business of making vinyl wraps to add custom graphics to vehicles, it’s not all that hard to be able to make the claim that you can support any given make or model.

However, this is different, because Cybertruck.

Depending on your point of view, you can argue a valid case that the Tesla Cybertruck in a few short weeks has achieved either phenomenal fame or phenomenal infamy. But love it or hate it, a gazillion people have been talking about the Cybertruck, writing about the Cybertruck, and so on.

And you’re reading about it right now, if you’ve made it this far into my article.

In public relations, a field that has been part of my life in a number of ways over the years, there is a concept known as newsjacking. It’s a simple concept: find a trending news topic that can link in some reasonably sensible way with a story that your organization has to tell, and come up with a pitch that makes that link into a news hook that can generate some coverage of your organizastion in the context of the larger trending story.

In many cases, poorly executed newsjacking attempts feel forced, awkward, and sometimes downright insulting. But this effort from Wrapmate was effective in grabbing my attention, at least. And to me it felt reasonably inoffensive and maybe even a bit clever.

They announced that they were supporting the Cybertruck with custom vehicle wraps, and they set up a landing page on their website where a business can upload a logo or other custom wrap design and see what it will look like on a Tesla Cybertruck.

A high degree of self-service in setting up graphics for a wrap appears to be among Wrapmate’s differentiators, and they claim to have local pros available “in every major city” to get the wrap job done once the graphics are uploaded.

A nice touch was the addition to their email pitch of an animated GIF, shown above, of what a sampling of custom graphics might look like if wrapped onto a Cybertruck. That’s something you don’t see too often in automotive PR pitches.

So, hats off to Wrapmate for this interesting little automotive PR nugget. Saying that you can support the Cybertruck with custom graphic wraps isn’t exactly an earth-shattering innovation. But the approach was certainly effective in standing out among the daily onslaught of meh pitches.

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