‘Good work solved a lot of problems’: Inside Uber’s public relations u-turn
Paulie Dery steered Uber through a public relations nightmare that involved a viral #DeleteUber campaign, passenger safety concerns, and a perceived disregard for driver’s employee needs. Dery explained at ADMA’s Global Forum on Tuesday how focusing on the human side of a technology company helped Uber survive.
Uber was up against it in 2017
Paulie Dery couldn’t have joined Uber at a worse time. He is currently chief marketing officer at AG1, a company that makes the Athletic Greens range of nutritional powder drinks, and before that ran marketing for cooler-box brand Yeti.
Dery’s career started in 2003 as a production assistant at M&C Saatchi, where he eventually led creative. He moved to RGA in New York where he worked as creative director for eight years.
Then Uber called in 2017, and offered him the executive creative director role. It was an intriguing prospect. He liked the product, but it didn’t strike him as a particular dynamic brand. It was, in essence, a blank page.
“I thought, well, actually, here’s one of the world’s great brands that didn’t have one, right? At the time, I couldn’t tell you what Uber was. Uber was a new brand. I’d used the product. The product’s incredible, right? But what was the brand? I had no idea.”
It sounded like fun — he’d go and build a brand.
As Dery told a packed conference room at The ADMA Global Forum in Sydney on Tuesday, he was driving cross-country with his seven-months-pregnant wife — moving to his new job — when the proverbial hit the fan.
“Uber fell apart, right? Absolute chaos.”
Paulie Dery at the ADMA Global Forum at Sydney’s Sofitel on Tuesday.
The social media movement #DeleteUber spread after the company made a series of blunders — from surge pricing during the Sydney siege, to turning off surge pricing during a New York taxi strike (the move was perceived by some as undermining the strike).
There were class actions over passenger safety claims, and privacy issues over customer tracking.
Internally, Uber fired more than 20 employees, including senior executives, after sexual harassment claims and workplace culture issues forced a third-party investigation.
“There was disaster after disaster. There was scandal after scandal,” Dery recalls. Uber wasn’t the blank page he had thought. He had two choices, do a literal u-turn and head home, or run to the metaphorical fire.
“I’m glad we did run to the fire, because it was so interesting to then build a brand while the house was on fire. It allowed me to do things I don’t think they would have let me do if everything was great.”
Upon arriving at Uber’s San Francisco offices, he quickly noticed that “marketing was always the last seat at the table”.
This was a company filled with software engineers.
He needed to rebuild the brand’s reputation, and due to the indifference of the executives he was working for, he was largely given carte blanche to experiment. Of course, there were roadblocks.
“One thing, when your brand is in a bad place, there are no friends,” Dery explains.
“All the Uber friends have disappeared. The Jay-Zs, the Beyoncés, they didn’t have much time to answer our calls all of a sudden. So I was like, ‘Well, what can we dive into?'”
He landed on two areas of focus: the product itself, and the community around it. But what was the Uber community?
“The one thing I think we uncovered was that the drivers are actually the community. The drivers.”
But Dery discovered that the drivers weren’t friends of Uber, either. This posed a huge problem.
Paulie Dery was speaking to a packed house
“You get in the car and the person who’s working for Uber will turn around and tell you how much they hated it. That’s not good, is it?”
He likens it to “getting on a plane and the captain telling you, ‘I hate this airline, so good luck, hope you make it'”.
He recalls that Uber’s reputation was so bad among its own drivers that he would direct his morning Uber driver to drop him at the Twitter offices, rather than Uber’s corporate headquarters.
One morning, he hopped into an Uber, and the driver was deaf. After an interesting conversation, he discovered that hearing impaired people find it very hard to get a job, and because of this, deaf drivers were massively over-represented at Uber.
Dery had found Uber’s community.
“I thought if you pair the product with the community, what story could you tell? We went back to the engineers and said, ‘Look, what about a deaf driving app? Could it line up? We know they drive on the app, could we make it a little bit easier?'”
Uber introduced a number of features for deaf Uber drivers, including flashing light notifications, the ability to text passengers rather than call, and simply notifying passengers their driver is deaf or hard of hearing.
User notification of a deaf Uber driver
“You’ve got to remember how bad it was to work at Uber at that time. People weren’t telling their family members they were working at Uber. It was embarrassing. All of a sudden we’re in the news for the right reasons. Out of nowhere. From being a punching bag.
“We were this great growth story that ruined it and now we’re getting some positive press.”
Uber turned from referring to its drivers as ‘supply’, to featuring them in their marketing. They also asked them what benefits they wanted. Paid toilet breaks were a big one. Not to be pinged with trip requests in the opposite direction when they are heading home for the night. Simple things.
The biggest revelation that came from actually communicating with their public-facing staff (or contracted workers — as they were legally deemed) was that most of them were driving Ubers for the benefit of loved ones.
“They weren’t driving for themselves. They were driving for their families. And they were driving so their kids could get educated.”
Dery launched UberPro – a driver loyalty program, where the company teamed with Arizona State University to offer 100% tuition coverage for a driver, or a chosen family member.
Uber became the first company to create a tuition program extended to family members.
“It’s still one of the most impactful things we did,” Dery says, “because the drivers were — all of a sudden — part of our conversation and they felt seen, and they wanted to work for us.”
Uber leaned into driver satisfaction — and the public glow it gives the company — and focused on the company’s Uber Freight division. The most obvious problem with being a long-haul truck driver is, by necessity, you go wherever the load takes you. This means you miss a lot of family occasions.
The solution was almost too simple: The ‘take me home’ feature that allows a driver to book a load from wherever they are to wherever they want to be. One button and the driver can be heading home, without zig-zagging across the country.
“Uber’s magic was always the digital and the physical coming together,” Dery says. “They just had thought of it as ‘a product’. As a storyteller, putting that story together was really strong.
“The momentum started to shift by telling these great stories about the product.”
At the offices in Silicon Valley, “the nerds” had started to thaw out regarding the marketing team. “They loved it. They were all of a sudden cool. The engineers were proud. They had friends, families saying ‘thank you. Did you make that? That’s so cool.'”
Dery discovered that “the C-suite have egos”, and this made him a powerful person in the company. “This was a good thing to understand, because they are human. They didn’t like turning around and telling people where they worked either. But, they were very high profile. Everybody knew where they worked.
“All of a sudden it was okay to be part of Uber. It was cool.
“We were now welcomed, the marketing team. ‘Come on in. What else you got? What else can we do?'”
From here, Dery let his imagination run wild.
He tapped Spike Lee to direct a bunch of lavishly expensive Uber advertisements. He hired NBA superstars LeBron James and Kevin Durant for an online commercial, where they sat in the back of an Uber with ESPN host Cari Champion as the driver, and discussed social issues, basketball, and politics. During the video, the pair insulted President Donald Trump.
It was a risky strategy. Dery said he had to personally sign the liability waiver before they released the video, which features LeBron James saying Trump “doesn’t give a f*** about people”, among other less-than-glowing statements.
After the video was released, Fox host Laura Ingraham said James should just “shut up and dribble”, moving the debate into the national sphere. Uber came along for the ride.
“I think creating energy and story and trust, meant they let us take a lot more risks moving forward,” he surmises.
“And if you look at Uber now they act like a grown up. It’s a mature business. It’s a well run business. It’s profitable. And it was just through story.
“We got great stories. We got friends back on board. The community of drivers was on board with us. It was a really great turning point for the brand. We did great work, smoothed over a lot of the problems. I didn’t have to justify things. I didn’t have to go explain finances. We just put good work out.
“Good work solved a lot of problems. Sometimes we just overthink this stuff.”
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