Hyundai wins this week’s Good PR

 15th April 2015    Good and Bad PR 

Good PR

Hyundai aims high

Stunts are always best when they’re big. Like, really huge. A story I read this week had all of the right ingredients to catch the media’s attention: something that could be seen from space, a heart-warming element and a pretty slick idea.

The South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai helped a 13-year-old girl send a message to her father on the International Space Station.

With the vast expanse of Nevada’s Delamar Dry Lake as a canvas and eleven Genesis Sedan vehicles as the, uh, pens, Hyundai had a team of stunt drivers to manoeuvre the cars just meters apart using sat-navs to write “Steph [hearts] you!” on the ground.

The enormous message was credited by Guinness as being the world’s largest tyre track image, measuring 59,808,480.26 square feet. Pretty impressive stuff.

Stephanie’s father confirmed that the message could be seen from space via a video link from the International Space Station, on which he showed his daughter the picture of the message he had taken on his camera.

Perhaps telling her dad she loved him on the video link would have been much less effort, but then we wouldn’t have this uber-cool stunt to talk about now, would we?

It actually took place on 18 January and was used to advertise the Hyundai Genesis, but it’s doing the rounds this week on the likes of Mashable, the Metro and other outlets.