Elon Musk Shows That Pr Can Be Beautiful

Did you see it? Brilliant, huh?

Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch in February was amazing for so many reasons that generations after us will look back on the event with nostalgic thanks that his SpaceX project, launching the Falcon Heavy rocket, opened the floodgates on a new era of space travel. Or something like that.

But for me, sending that Tesla into space with SpaceX, complete with its ‘driver’, Starman, is a mic drop moment in PR.

While physicists and accountants marvelled at the prospects for low-cost space travel, most of us in the PR and communications world were captivated by the images of the test payload. One of Musk’s Tesla Roadster’s driven by a mannequin named Starman, playing David Bowie’s Space Oddity on continuous loop is now heading towards the sun and then on to orbit Mars (or at least it was until it veered off course, last seen heading towards an asteroid).

The video and still images of the Tesla above the earth are cinematic, mesmerising and moving. We talk to our clients a lot about eliciting emotions from effective communications and this had a – quite literal – otherworldly majesty about it. Goosebumps moments.

Each June, creative bigwigs gather in the South of France for the Cannes Lions, a conference and awards ceremony that recognises and showers Cannes-like praise on the very best work from the global creative industries. They shouldn’t even bother convening this year and just give everything to Elon and SpaceX because it is one of the greatest,

most visually-stunning PR stunts of all time.

They won’t, of course, because doing something absolutely awesome for purely for the hell of it never quite cuts it unless there is ‘purpose’, a cause célèbre to elevate, and someone will sniffily point out that ‘This is not a first’. All true, but the meaninglessness of it all makes it all the more wonderful. Musk himself admitted that it was nothing more than a means to alleviate the boredom of the usual mass simulators sent with rockets, which are typically lumps of concrete or steel. He did it for fun. He did it because he could.

And now we’ll remember Starman coolly cruising his maroon convertible Tesla past the earth with the tunes blaring for the rest of time. I love it.

As noted, ‘sending something into space’ is nothing new in the world of PR and the episode reminds me of the space race among UK PR agencies ten years ago.

It was sparked sometime in 2008 when images of a teddy bear alone and smiling benignly on the edges of the Earth’s atmosphere achieved blanket media coverage. More remarkably, it was done as a primary school project using nothing more complex than a weather balloon, some string and a video camera.

Every PR with half their wits about them suddenly realised that they too could send random stuff into space (although technically the edge of space) and get amazing images by slipping a few grand to bewildered climatologists at Cambridge University.

As long as the payload was small enough to be held in one hand, the world, quite literally, was yours. In this period, an array of toy figures, foodstuffs and FMCG products in space flooded picture desks at media outlets – with mixed results.

Soon it became a cliché and we all moved on, although a take away in Hull repeated the feat last year and made national news by a sending a portion of cod n chips into space. Compared to a chippy tea, it’s hard to see this SpaceX Tesla stunt ever being beaten for sheer visual spectacle.

‘Iconic’ is a word abused and misused by PR professionals, but these images are.

The only drawback is that ‘marketing gurus’ are revising their opening PowerPoint slide with an image of the Tesla above the Earth and the caption ‘How far can you take your brand?’.

There’s always a downside to everything.