In the land of the blind, it would appear the US search engine is PR king

There are times when even the strongest story benefits from some smart stunt-ology, just to give it a little added frisson.

But also to ensure that, in the case of Google’s stunt to promote its self-driving car this week, a few more of your products make their way into the editorial and your maximising the opportunity for your brand.

That’s just what the PR maestros at the search engine giant have manage to pull with their latest innovation – the creation of a modified Toyota Prius that uses their GPS technology to self-navigate.

What better way to show off the real power of their kit than to pop a medically blind driver behind the wheel for its global debut?

And if you’re Google and in something of a quandary about how to demonstrate the power of your (frankly, ailing) social network tool, then what better way to get people talking about that too than to use it as the platform for the launch?

Oh, and if you happen to own YouTube, why not shoot a film of the whole thing and pop it up as part of the show?

Why’s it work?

• Your first reaction, of course, is likely to be that it works because the product that’s being promoted is truly amazing. Fair enough, but the point about this piece of work is that it doesn’t stop there.
  
• The team working on the announcement hasn’t been lazy in their approach to making it.
  
• They’ve sweated the asset and have come up with an idea that has gone truly global.
  
• They’ve turned a technology news story into a transport story, a healthcare story, a public policy story. In doing so, they’ve reached parts of the media they might otherwise have missed.
  
• More than anything, though, they’ve turned it into a human story with a real person who is able in an utterly compelling way to show a real benefit from the kit on display.

The fact that they’ve gone one step beyond even that and have worked out how this announcement can be made to work for every asset in the Google armoury makes it all the more impressive. The fact that so much of the coverage has read “in a posting on Google Plus …” of the announcement is simply the cherry on an already well-iced and decorated cake

James Gordon-MacIntosh is a managing partner at Hope&Glory PR and from time-to-time pens Spinning Around, a blog that he describes as “thinking out loud”.