How do you introduce a disruptive brand when the global narrative is already working against you?

AJ Tills, Uber’s first employee in New Zealand, joins CRUNCH to reflect on the early days of launching Uber locally - from recruiting drivers with a backpack of iPhones to managing public questions about safety, legality and trust.

This episode explores the communications and marketing challenges behind one of New Zealand’s most recognisable market launches: how to educate a market, create social proof, work alongside policy and operations teams, and build enough legitimacy for people to download the app and try something new.

AJ Tills’ experience as the first employee of Uber in New Zealand offers a unique perspective on the intersection of technology, marketing, and public relations within a highly scrutinized launch environment. His recounting of the early days of Uber reveals the challenges of introducing a disruptive service to a market that was not only unfamiliar with app-based ride-sharing but also wary of its implications for traditional transportation models.

Tills highlights the critical role of education in this process, noting that overcoming public skepticism necessitated a robust communication strategy that emphasised transparency and engagement with various stakeholders, including riders, drivers, and regulatory authorities.

Throughout the conversation, Tills reflects on the innovative marketing and PR strategies employed during Uber's initial rollout, particularly the use of grassroots tactics to build a user base and foster community engagement. The emphasis on direct communication with potential drivers and riders, coupled with promotional incentives, exemplifies a dynamic approach to market penetration that prioritized user experience and satisfaction.

As Tills discusses the evolution of Uber's brand perception over time, he underscores the importance of adaptability and responsiveness to changing consumer needs and societal expectations. This episode serves as an invaluable resource for marketing and communications professionals, offering lessons on stakeholder engagement, the management of public perception, and the strategic implementation of disruptive technologies in traditional markets.

Takeaways:

• AJ Tills recounts the challenges faced while introducing Uber in New Zealand amidst global scrutiny and negative media coverage.
• The launch required significant education and trust-building efforts to familiarise New Zealanders with the Uber platform.
• Tills emphasises the importance of stakeholder engagement and communication strategies for successfully entering a new market.
• He shares insights on leveraging partnerships with trusted organisations to enhance credibility and community acceptance of Uber.
• The discussion highlights the innovative marketing tactics employed, including guerrilla marketing techniques to expand Uber's rider base.
• Tills reflects on the rapid feedback loops and adaptability that were crucial in addressing market needs and improving service delivery.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Uber
• Exaba
• HMC

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Here we go.

Welcome to Crunch everyone.

We've got a great conversation for you today.

Joining us is AJ Tills and he is the Chief Customer Officer and US President of Waikato based data storage company Exeva.

Exiba.

Exiba.

Excellent.

And we're lucky to catch him because he's in the country now, but he's soon heading off to Austin, Texas where he's going to be living and working.

So thanks AJ for joining us today.

But for today, AJ's going to have a bit of a different hat on.

We recently heard him speak about his experiences more than a decade ago launching Uber in New Zealand.

And that sparked our interest to having him on the podcast.

When AJ joined Uber as its first New Zealand employee, he was helping introduce a service I guess many New Zealanders, obviously they had never used, maybe or even heard of.

And it was also a service that did not fit neatly within New Zealand's existing sort of transport regulations.

Governments around the world were questioning its, its legality.

Taxi industries were protesting and international media coverage was often hostile.

And in fact, at the same time it was launching in New Zealand, taxi driver protests against the company in France were hitting international headlines.

So our conversation today with AJ will explore what it was like to launch Uber in New Zealand.

Amongst that international scrutiny.

And a particular focus today obviously is going to be on PR stakeholder engagement and building trust in a new market.

And also joining us is Natalie Swart, one of our senior account managers here at hmc.

So thank, thanks Natalie for joining us today as well.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah.

So to kick things off, AJ kind of set the scene for us.

Tell us about becoming the first Uber employee in New Zealand.

What were you sort of brought in to do?

I guess firstly, thank you for having me.

It's always a pleasure to look back in time at the experience that I had at Uber.

I think it's kind of like opening up an old university textbook.

Like a lot of the lessons are still really valuable while the applications might have changed.

And so a lot of the stories and learnings that I had from that period of time, it's actually a remote remarkable how much of them are still highly relevant and valuable today.

2014, I joined Uber.

The traditional modus operandi for establishing a new market was to hire a pod.

And so I was hired as part of a two man team at that period of time, myself and a gentleman called Michael Cook.

And really what we did was own each side of the marketplace.

So with Uber, right, you had a technology platform that connected riders and drivers.

And so we had a driver operations manager and then myself who was effectively tasked with growing a rider base.

And that was really the role to start.

And to be honest, I didn't really have a clue what I was doing.

It was my first foray into technology.

I'll talk about what a traditional day used to look like, but I think what's really interesting is where Uber was at that period of time.

So globally, the US had launched and Uber was traditionally a black car service.

And that's where the idea started.

So it was.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so the idea actually came to Travis Callen and Garrett Camp.

Travis was the CEO for many, many years.

When they were in Paris, they'd been at an event and they were around the Eiffel Tower and there were all of these black cars or limousines on the side of the road that were not being used and they needed a ride home.

And when they went up to one of the windows of the drivers, they said, look, we can't take you because it needs to be pre booked.

And so that was the genesis for Uber was can you actually pre book rather than just calling up?

And so if you think about the US tons of executive drivers, limousine drivers who are highly underutilized, could Uber put them on the platform and create more access to high quality but lower cost executive rides?

And so that launched in, I think it was four or five different cities across the U.S. france was the second country in the world to launch, you know, obviously significantly because of the inception of the idea, but Australia was the third.

And that was because one of the best leaders that I've ever worked with and had the opportunity to know was studying in the US and came across the idea and really campaigned to bring it to Australia.

And Australia also had highly underutilized black cars sitting around.

That's where Uber was.

People loved it.

The tagline was ride like a baller.

You know, people going from house party to pubs and clubs and being able to get access to this awesome experience that they might have not otherwise had access to.

You know, there were a lot of stories in the early days of people sitting at lunch together and just going, hey, watch this.

Booking a car and then going on the block and coming back to lunch, like it was just magic, right?

And you still saw that in some of the early days of the different products.

But to have that at your fingertips was really, truly magical.

Now that's where Uber was.

Now, when we looked at launching New Zealand, New Zealand doesn't have that black car base, right?

There's very limited executive vehicles.

You know, obviously there was corporate cabs at that point in time, but that was almost the upper limit unless you wanted to go to a private driver.

So in most countries around the world, taxi was a highly regulated industry.

And that means that there was only a few number of medallions or licenses handed out.

Think about New York, think about London.

And what that did was aim to standardize quality.

But it also meant that price was quite high.

And if you fast forward to New Zealand.

The goal there was to increase quality through competition and decrease price.

And actually the opposite had happened.

There was a whole range of cowboy operators.

It might have been small numbers of cars going out on their own, so that quality wasn't standardized.

And also, if you looked at the top ten dollar per kilometer for taxi, New Zealand had three cities in the world.

Top ten, I think Queenstown was one, Auckland was six and Wellington might have been nine.

Interesting.

I wouldn't have picked that.

Yeah, incredible, right?

And so space that Uber launched into was really, how do we create lower cost transport for New Zealanders?

Right.

And so we decided we were going to come in and we were going to largely work with the taxi base, so registered drivers in order to be able to offer that service to more people.

Now you mentioned obviously some of the controversy happening around the same time.

So in other markets, obviously Uber was taking off with this black car product, Uber black.

They were looking for ways to make it more accessible and approachable by the masses.

And that's where UberX came in.

Now, UberX, we used to call it peer to peer.

It's now ride sharing, really, that was typically just a regular person.

So an unregistered driver, not a taxi driver who had been through a criminal background check, depending on the different markets, but a criminal background check, obviously a vehicle check and a whole range of other checks driving another human.

And that caught a lot of controversy, you know, because I think the idea of riding with a stranger was quite foreign.

And particularly the idea of summoning that stranger through an app, calling them to Your house.

Exactly.

It's so normal these days.

But yeah, the idea of like pressing a button and some person turns up in a car and.

Yeah, so that whole thing was very foreign.

Now the fact that it was foreign and different and innovative was one thing, but I think when you're totally potentially disrupting a whole series of people call it taxi, you're just going to put fuel on the fire.

And you know, what we saw really in France, it was actually the same week that I was hired, was hundreds and hundreds of taxis protesting by parking around the Arc de Triomphe, lighting fires.

And that's where the storm started.

You had press saying dangerous, illegal, etc.

Etc.

And Australia was, was the next one to follow.

So Australia launched uberX I think the first week that I started.

And so that was again protests and press, etc.

And so when UberEx launched in New Zealand, we're actually the first market in the world to launch legally because we were working with, with taxi drivers.

That's where things started.

Interesting.

Just as you're talking there, I'm thinking like Uber really has changed the culture of using a taxi.

Like, you know, even growing up in America, like using a taxi that was only like something that rich people in cities did, you know, like it's just changed the culture of how we grab a ride, really.

It's very, very interesting to think only 12 years ago we were sitting here, not really even have heard before.

You know, I still remember the first Uber I ever took.

Oh, right, okay.

I was living in Chicago at the time and I actually was doing a marathon in Indianapolis.

My family were in this hotel and I had to sneak out early to go to the start and I had to call an Uber and I remember dropping a pin and sending it to everyone I know.

Cause I was just so scared I was going to be murdered and left on the side of the road.

So funny.

Well, I'm glad you're here with us today.

Yeah, you survived.

All's well that ends well.

So when you actually arrived in New Zealand, almost beggars belief that there wasn't a big machine behind you.

Two people's pretty lean.

How many hats were you actually wearing?

Yeah, it sounds lean.

And I think that was actually one of the reasons for the success is you empowered two, you know, hopefully really, really talented people who know the city really well, know the people really well and you really just set them loose on the city.

But they're highly supported, not just by a really strong tech team out of the US or in different markets around the world.

But also if you think every single country that was live at that point in time had two of the same people and so you were never really on your own.

And so I had three or four people across Australia that were literally trying to do the same thing as me.

And you know, going back to that two sided pods, right.

So Michael's focus was really drivers online and trips per hour.

My job was making sure that we had riders requesting and then so we'd catch up almost every morning and we would try and understand how many zeros we got.

Now, zero was an unfulfilled request, which means that a rider was requesting and there was no, no driver or if drivers are not actually catching rides.

And so that same conversation was happening in, you know, 10 cities around the world.

And so we would constantly be on calls going, all right, what is that person doing?

What have you tested this week that has actually seen results?

And it was just such a quick feedback loop, right.

You'd be sending out an email test one day with a change to the referral program, you would be testing a giveaway campaign.

And then if it worked, you'd instantly get on a call with three other people and it would be shipped the next day to 10 other markets.

It sounds like it was a lean team, but you were genuinely part of something much bigger that was all pulling in the same direction.

I think it's always interesting to talk through what a typical day look like because it's quite different to many other companies.

I think Uber talks about bits and atoms, obviously bits being the foundation of the digital world and Adams being the foundation of the biological, the physical.

And it really was that combination of both.

We had this amazing technology, but so much that work actually existed in the real world.

And so I was flooding at the time.

And every morning I would come down, maybe about six o', clock, I would order a taxi and call up and the taxi driver would arrive and then I'd get that person to take me maybe two or three minutes away down the street and I'd have a backpack of iPhones all loaded with the driver, the Uber driver app.

And I would spend that two minutes trying to convince that driver to also drive on Uber.

Doesn't mean they need to leave taxi.

They can also drive on Uber.

And so I'd take that ride and then as soon as I'd been dropped off, I'd just order another taxi and I'd probably catch like five to seven taxis in the morning to different places all across the city.

Market research, wow.

Just sales.

I Mean, we're saying, and effectively during your downtime, you can turn on this app and get another stream of income.

So we did really believe in the proposition.

So we'd take five to seven taxis in the morning, go into the office, and in the early days, all of us were on support.

And so that involved answering all of the messages that had come in probably from the evening before, whether it was the driver took me the wrong way or I had to cancel and I got charged, or all the way through to I threw up in the taxi, which was unfortunately very common on a Saturday morning to receive.

Saturdays and Sundays were quite big in terms of answering those support tickets, but it was a great way to get market research.

And so I'd spend an hour or so doing that and then the day would literally be about how do we drive trips that night, either bring drivers on board or trying to introduce riders for the first time and create incentives around that.

We would partner and work with a lot of events, not just your big scale events that you're thinking about, but even we'd be calling bars and restaurants who were hosting pub nights and seeing if we could give away free rides.

And then in the evenings, it would be a mixture of catching taxis again and then also walking around bars and restaurants and handing out free rides.

So you really covered that full gambit of different channels and different tests and different stages of customer all the way through the day.

That's not a 9 to 5 job.

I know it's really interesting and it's sort of like an older term, but that, you know, guerrilla marketing, you know, you're just like doing what needs to be done every day to build market share.

Yeah, I use the word like quick feedback loop.

Right.

The whole idea was like, if you execute or you spend a unit of time on one thing, how quickly do you find out whether it works or not?

And if it works, you just do it more and more and more and more and more.

That's what every day was.

It was identifying different tests that we could do that was going to create a positive outcome.

So it was incredibly fulfilling.

I think it certainly was not 9 to 5, but every single day you knew exactly what you had contributed and you could walk away going, I either smashed it or I need to do better tomorrow.

Again, you just had all the support and unification of the wider team.

Listening to you talk too.

It's a unique product because in sitting here today, like I said before, it's hard to believe a time when Uber didn't exist.

But launching a product into A market like that where no one's really heard of it before, they've never used it before, it really requires some education, doesn't it, as well, before you can just start selling?

So talk to us a little bit about that.

We started by talking about the controversy, right?

And it would be remiss for me not to reference this as part of the overall growth journey.

When you launch a product and every newspaper around the world is saying, this is too cheap, it is going to have a positive effect, right?

Everyone's like, oh, how do I test this thing?

That's quite cheap and how are they doing that?

And so in amongst obviously some of the hurtful from a commercial aspect that wasn't emotionally hurtful kind of messaging, there were these really big hooks that got people to go, I may not try it, but I actually want to see what it's all about, right?

If it is this cheap thing and this magical thing, hey, I'll try it.

That was one thing, was actually there is a saying like, all press is good press.

I don't believe that.

But in this case, there was a lot of benefit from that.

Secondly was truly, it felt like a magic experience.

Again, I reference people sitting at lunch and just genuinely wanting to show people that they had access to this thing.

Even if it was just a taxi turning up and giving them a ride around the block, it still felt magical.

Press the button, see the driver coming, you've got all of their information, and then at the end you're giving them a rating.

Right, Interesting.

And so you lean into that and we had what we called a give get program, where if I was already riding with Uber, I could give you my referral code.

And if you used it, your first ride would be free, under $10, depending on what Y was.

And then I would get the same $10 of, you know, X.

And so, you know, that was a function that we really used to leverage our initial base of early adopters to say, I have access to this amazing thing.

I can give you access to this amazing thing.

And it took off.

You look at the initial use cases.

The typical use case for someone was they would be out on a Thursday or Friday night or maybe Saturday, and one of their friends who had used Uber before would take Uber out, and then they'd be out of the club.

I'm showing my age, who goes to the club anymore?

And they would say to their friend, hey, I can get you a free ride home.

And that means that I get a free ride home, right?

Win, win.

So they'd share Their cod.

And that friend would ride for the first time, probably get home and go, wow, that was quite interesting.

And then they probably wouldn't touch it for another week or so.

And then they might be heading to work and it might be raining, and so they might use it to get from their home to the train station.

And they go, whoa, that actually works a little bit.

And that was reliable.

And then the next thing would be, maybe between business meetings, hey, we'll try this app.

And so you can see how that use case actually starts to work into something a bit more habitual.

And when you build that ease cost and then reliability into it, people go, oh, I can see where this fits.

And my everyday life.

And that's where, you know, I think you mentioned we look back and say, I can't believe this didn't exist.

But it's just so quickly become such a valuable part of people's lives because it is this, you know, easy, relatively low cost, and it's, you know, reliable.

I just think in my personal experience here in Hamilton too, you know, it wasn't in Hamilton when it launched in Auckland and he had that FOMO is like, when's it coming to Hamilton?

You know, which was in Hamilton.

When you're choosing which city to launch, unfortunately, it's not as simple as, like, let's turn it on everywhere.

Right?

Yeah.

Because you can very quickly have a negative experience where, know, you might have three or four drivers on the road and just no riders and suddenly you just.

That's not a great product.

Or even worse.

Right.

You could have a whole range of riders who are trying to get home and they're expecting to be able to get home with Uber.

And then Uber's got no drivers online and you're leaving them out and, you know, literally in the cold.

And so you need to be really thoughtful about the density of a city and whether you can service that.

And so even in Auckland, I'll tell you a story I get PTSD from.

This is so bad, even in Auckland, you needed to really think very carefully about where your drivers were going to be located to make sure that you were going to maximize trip pickups.

And obviously, there's a lot of data behind this.

We could see where people were leaving from on Mass in the mornings, and we could see where all is anonymized data.

You can see where people needed to be picked up in the evening.

All right, so maybe there's hotspots in the cbd, maybe Parnell on Wednesday nights.

It's an area we need to cover.

And are you sort of sharing that with the drivers?

Are they getting access to that information?

We are telling them where they need to be.

We're not sharing that information.

And you can do that real time.

Right.

So we had.

It was originally called God View, then it became Heaven, where it was a map of a city and you could see anonymized eyeballs where people were looking for rides.

So there was this ongoing heat map.

And if you saw that there were lots of people looking at the app looking for a ride, you could actually select where drivers were and text them to go to that location.

So even in real time, we would obviously communicate with drivers a week before and say, this is where we recommend that you are.

But then even real time, we could say, hey, we're getting a lot of requests from here.

Can you go and service them?

So getting back to my ptsd, we used to work with a lot of events.

And so even I mentioned, like nightclub evenings or pub quizzes and things like that, anywhere we could get a shout out and a few new trips from.

And then I managed to.

This was really early days.

I managed to get in touch with someone who has organized an event at Mount Smart Stadium.

And I think there was, you know, maybe two or three thousand people there that were going along, maybe even more.

And it was a electronic festival and it was happening in about five months.

We had maybe 10 cars on the road at this point in time, at peak time.

So, like, there was no way we were going to be able to service that right now.

But I was like, well, we'll be there in five months.

100%, Yeah.

And it was quite as simple as, like, you know, we headed the whole process down where I could create a promo code saying everyone gets a free ride.

Not just new users, but existing users get that free.

Free ride.

We would package that up with the logos and the copy and then we would send that to the event owner.

And really, that was sort of hands off.

They now had access to that free ride gated to that event.

Right.

So I obviously got.

This is a great win.

This event's in five months time.

Here you go, here's your code.

You run with it five months later.

We were a lot bigger by then, but we were not big enough to fully cover Mount Smart.

I remember it was a Friday night and I was out for dinner.

It would have been about 9 o' clock, and I was coming home and I get a text from the.

The organizer of the festival and he was like, just checking.

We're all on we're all good.

Drivers are all ready.

The gates are going to open in about an hour.

And I just went white because I knew that we may have two or three drivers out there.

But, you know, oh, my goodness, you're talking.

That's 200 people, people, possibly more, coming out and requesting at the same time, at the same point.

That's a headache.

Yes.

Plus, we had surge pricing at that point in time, which we can go into, which meant that they were probably going to experience quite high fares.

So all of these emotions went through my head, and so I went home and lay on my bed with my laptop out with this view on and just started texting as many drivers as possible through this platform to go.

Go to Mt.

Smart.

Go to Mt.

Smart.

Go to Mt.

Smart.

An hour later, I could see this, like, ball of red just light up, which was hundreds of people opening the app to request Uber.

After the things.

There was maybe three or four cars in the area by that point in time.

So we could actually click on the individual dot and then text the rider as well.

Just say, hey, look, this is what's going on.

So I was there.

I was texting drivers through the platform.

I was messaging riders to say, hey, this one coming out right now.

And you could see, you know, the anonymized dots walking in real time, so you knew where you needed to be picking people up.

And so for about four or five hours, I was just sitting there trying to make sure that drivers got out there and riders got home.

And that was a hell of an experience.

But.

And did you have any fallout from that, like, in terms of reputation or.

A little.

No, no, no, no.

You handled it.

Yeah.

Look, I think in those days, Uber got the benefit of the doubt, and that changed over a period of time.

But what that meant was, like, they knew that Uber was a relatively new, innovative company.

You know, the vision for Uber was transport as reliable as running water everywhere.

And, you know, we certainly weren't up to that expectation yet.

So it was almost a bonus if they could get an.

They were probably getting an Uber because there were no taxis there.

Right.

And so it wasn't.

It likely wasn't logically fair to say, uber's not here, it's their fault.

At least at that point in time, it wasn't.

So there was thankfully no fallout.

I was actually more worried about what Michael would say, who was leading our drivers, because if there was too many missed trips and you know, not enough people were getting home that was going to affect our demand in the future and, you know, it might possibly impact supply.

So, you know, I was more worried about the internal, internal drilling that I could have got after that.

But thankfully, I think you're just running so fast and people have optimistic intent, so all worked out well.

Being able to meet demand is one massive challenge.

In terms of the trust, though, I imagine building that trust in different countries must differ markedly.

How trusting are New Zealanders?

Yeah, do they trust a new brand like that when it's coming in the market?

Well, I'm thinking about the whole proposition, right.

Strangers in a car.

Yeah, for sure.

It's a great question.

I haven't genuinely thought about it in terms of like a trust scale.

I think New Zealand has quite a strong base of early adopters and so there are people who just instantly latch onto these new things and talk about it quite a lot.

But then we have a large base of later adopters.

And so you do get that initial traction, but then getting to the point where you have enough trust and social proof in order to acquire that next wave is quite challenging.

We really came at it from two sides and I think working with our internal comms team at that point in time was just so critical.

I've reflected on this quite a lot.

When you're a marketer, that was my background, you learn about positioning and messaging.

But true communications strategy is very different to that.

And it's not just, you know, how do we word this?

And so, you know, at Uber, we built out, really, this leadership team of people who were just exceptional at their craft.

And whether that was policy or comms, obviously operations, everything that we did, once we got to the point where we knew that there was strong reputational risk, and reputational risk would impact trust and trust would impact the ability to be able to grow.

We really invested, invested a lot in making sure that the way that we were representing ourselves was fair.

And so shout out to Katie, who was our first head of communications for Australia, New Zealand.

Everything that we were doing was really wrapped in a very authentic expression of what we thought we were doing.

And those were sort of three things.

One was it was good for riders, it was good for drivers and it was good for cities.

And that was foundational to not just our mindset of going out to market, but also internally, because.

Because you're facing backlash, the press is saying you're bad, family are saying that you're doing something illegal.

In many markets around the world, people in my position were getting Put in prison.

You need to really believe in what you're doing.

And so when you go back to those things, it's good for riders, it's good for drivers, it's good for cities.

For riders, access to lower cost transportation was not traditionally offered.

New Zealand's public transport is notoriously sporadic or scattered and taxi was too expensive and so real.

Really aiming to make a more accessible price point for transportation.

I think drink driving is one that we saw as being able to have a huge ability on because of the reliability, because of the cost.

There are things like transport deserts where it's just impossible to get around anywhere if you don't have a vehicle.

The whole proposition was there for riders, for drivers, it was economic opportunity.

And that's not just for taxi drivers who need to earn a bit more money.

We saw teachers, we saw stay at home parents using this within their day at a time that suited them in order to just supplement their other income or be able to pay a few bills.

And so the economic opportunity for drivers was really material.

And for them to be able to choose that in their own time really was the start of the gig economy.

And then for cities, similarly, you can talk about drink driving, et cetera, but it got people out and about.

That's something that I think New Zealand could benefit a lot more from.

How do we get people out of their homes?

How do we get people spending time face to face and being able to work with cities to be able to achieve that is really important.

So comms was one aspect of building trust.

You can all laugh at my second one.

So part of my role.

So I was in New Zealand for one and a half years launching building the team here.

And then we started to centralize a lot of the functions that were happening day to day.

And one of those functions was about building trust and being part of our cities.

And so we started this team that was literally stood up.

And this was when we were going through the regulatory process.

No one really, whether it was New Zealand or Australia or other markets around the world, no one really knew how to regulate us.

Like, I don't think it was an ill intent, negative thing.

Back to your, your initial point, Heather.

It was about education because it was so unknown.

100%.

Yeah.

And so it's this idea of like, how do you regulate an app that is not a taxi, that's a platform, you press a button and a ride is able to get a driver.

And you know, that was just so new.

And so, you know, we came up with this idea of, okay, in order to get regulated, we need sentiment to be positive and we need trust.

So how are we going to do that?

I moved to Sydney and we literally put on the whiteboard the top 10 most trusted brands across Australia and New Zealand.

You think Whitakers, the Red Cross, we had the spca, plenty of others.

The Red Cross was a really interesting one.

You know, we're being told that we're illegal.

Front page of the paper, we're legal.

And you walk into the Red Cross office, it's one of the most trusted brands around the world, and you're saying to the CEO, basically, we want to partner with you.

Yeah.

Laughed out of the room.

We didn't want to do anything.

Our whole mindset and strategy was not let's do something that's just aesthetic.

It was, how do we be authentic?

Is there significant value that we could create from this?

Partnerships that's going to show the benefit of Uber.

And so over time, we continued talking to the Red Cross and we found out that in New Zealand and Australia, the way that the Red Cross makes a lot of money is from secondhand clothing sales.

It's those donations from clothes and then sold in the stores.

So we thought, hey, we can solve this.

You know, what's the big frustration about donating clothes, cleaning out your closet, taking them in the car, where do you drop them?

Da, da, da, da.

We went back to the Red Cross and we got approval to run this event.

Keep in mind, we're still unregulated, not illegal and so on one day we obviously marketed it and talked about it, but people could download the app or use the app if they're an existing rest rider and request a car within a Red Cross view within the app that would come to their home and collect their secondhand clothing and pick it up and then take it to a central location where it would be sorted, it would be and then delivered to the Red Cross.

And in that one day, Uber became the highest ever contributor towards the Red Cross from a corporate standpoint.

Wow.

Just in one day.

And I mean, you know that.

And do you think that worked?

Like, do you think the consumer thought that was a great.

Yeah, I mean, 100%.

So it worked on two levels.

One is this technology impacts the real world and can have a really positive effect.

Two is for someone to take out their phone, press the button, expect to get a ride is quite a high bar to consumption.

Right.

Particularly if you're going to a meeting or going to the airport for a first time, you're like, okay, I can't trust this thing.

So how do you lower that bar?

You get them to use the app for something that is.

Is a lower risk.

Can I press the button and get something and see this work without it being such a failure if it doesn't work?

So the second thing that we did was with the SPCA.

One of the SPCA's biggest problems is adoption.

And so we worked with the SPCA in New Zealand to run Uber kittens.

And what we did was Uber kittens.

Okay, I like this already.

Yeah.

And so what we did was get, might have been 20, 30 of the.

We didn't select them based on cuteness, but they were cute kittens and group them into, know, maybe five or six each.

And we put them in the backs of cars that were well looked after and supported by members of the spca.

And for one day only, people could request a car and a bunch of kittens would show up and you would have an hour of kitten time in your office.

Just magical.

Yeah, I need this, I need information.

I'm talking about the cleaning bill.

That's practical, anyway.

And then you could adopt them.

So it was really with a goal of can we actually help raise awareness for the need for adoption and actually have an impact there.

So bear in mind, obviously we knew this was going to go gangbusters.

I had arranged with, I think it was the team at HAFA that would be our first stop.

We'd do a bit of a social media stop.

We'd have people there and kittens.

This was in the.

I think it was the old Hoffa building in Auckland, down in the city.

And one of the kittens escaped and went inside a hole.

The wall.

Oh, geez.

And I was like, okay, this is bad.

This is a risk that PR people probably wouldn't have planned for.

Yeah, this is.

This is bad.

Anyway, obviously we had a whole bunch of other trips that needed to happen to people requesting.

And so I said to the team, all right, take the car and take the kittens to the next stop and I'll wait and get this one.

And I sat there, I can't remember how many hours again, three, four, just trying to coax this kitten out of the wall.

And all I could think about was the front page of the Herald next day.

Being Uber kills kids.

You know, that's like the single biggest way to ruin your brand and reputation and trust is.

Anyway, thankfully we got it out and it was very, very successful.

But to answer your question, the way that we built trust was, you know, really authentic value adding partnerships with Trusted brands, trust by association, and then two, doing things that they could see a real impact from.

You've talked about regulations and government earlier.

We'd love to know a little bit more about that.

Given that the rules weren't really designed for urban anywhere, it's necessitating, it's requiring a complete shift in thinking and regulatory sort of like frameworks.

Describe the process that went on in New Zealand in terms of the regulations that followed suit.

I mean, this was a real journey for me as well.

I don't think anyone had done that.

And journalists are people too, and politicians are people too.

So it wasn't like journalists and politicians were not using Uber.

Yeah.

They just couldn't figure out how to regulate it or really they were talking about the things that were, you know, part of the public conversation at that point in time.

And so, you know, when it comes to working with government, we had a really strong policy team and communications team, but it was about education.

You know, we weren't trying to say this is the exact regulation that you need.

It was more about, hey, this is what the app does, this is what it could do.

And these are the benefits that, that we see.

There were some nuances to that.

So, you know, the whole idea of the difference between a limo and taxi is limos can only be sort of pre booked.

And so the idea of a private car was it need to be pre booked.

So part of that regulation was establishing that an app is pre booking.

You know, you're pressing the button, it's getting accepted and then it's not hailing.

Right.

And so part of that was Uber drivers were not allowed to be in taxi ranks, so they couldn't sit on the side of the road and accept pickups.

Another one was they weren't allowed to sign signage.

So, you know, drivers had to, if they had corporate cab signs or they had to take their blue bubble, I think was the other one, they had to take their signage off.

Now that was if you're thinking about growth, you're thinking about what are the barriers to entry.

Right.

And so for a driver who had a taxi, they probably had these signs bolted on and.

Yeah.

Anyway, and so the team worked with an engineer to develop taxi signs that were magnetic on the top, so you could easily take them off and magnetic science.

And so it was just an example of kind of solving these problems.

But you can see how it's multiple different.

It's not just Uber is regulated, it's hailing taxis, it's signage, even down to the point of in Order.

When we were working directly with taxi drivers, because we did eventually go to full peer to peer, which was again, a bit of a journey, we noticed that a driver would have to come into the office and we would check their vehicle.

Vehicle, we would check their license, we'd do a criminal background check.

But then we had a piece of paper that we had to sign that would get sent to Palmerston North.

Someone physically in Palmerston north would look at it, sign it and then send it back to Auckland.

And so that process just felt.

And it was, you know, that's five days, right?

Maybe more.

And so drivers would come in and then we'd have to get them back to come in when that paperwork had come through.

Now, how do you compress that to a day, 24 hours or even.

Even just in the moment?

At some point we offered to build a platform that the rest of New Zealand could use and taxi could use in order to be able to onboard drivers quicker.

But that wasn't really supported.

So it was just consistently about showing where Uber was able to create a lot of value.

Now, that didn't get us all the way while we're in Australia.

Australia is really, for legal purposes is a whole bunch of different countries.

You know, you think at the state level, very, very different methodologies.

Some transport ministers in different states absolutely hate.

Some of the public didn't understand us.

And so you had all of these different views, perceptions, perspectives all across Australia and New Zealand was very similar, right?

I think it was.

Simon Bridges, at that point in time was dealing with a lot of this.

But the goal was the same, right?

How do we actually enforce and implement safe, sensible regulation?

And so there's a whole bunch of conversations going on with every single transport minister and we were really just waiting for the first time one to go.

What we kind of found out was a lot of the people that we were meeting with were referencing like, well, how big is Uber?

We already knew that there was millions of people that were using it every day, that it was so embedded in Australia and in New Zealand.

But people didn't see that, right?

Because they're just everywhere, everyday cars and they don't have signage.

So you don't look around and go, oh, there's tons of Ubers here.

Right?

And so we could see how big it was, but people who weren't riding couldn't see that.

So we developed this idea of like, let's out.

Let our riders and drivers speak for themselves, themselves.

And so this really snowballed and we heard from camera that act had agreed to be the first state in Australia to regulate Uber.

We'd been working on that for a period of time.

And they said, look, it's.

It was about 3pm, might have been a Tuesday or something like that.

And they said, At 10am tomorrow, we're going to announce it live.

And so then it's like, all right, how.

How do we take this and spread it, right?

So I built this inc email for every single state that had an interactive map where people could click on it and search.

So you go through the email to a landing page that was their state.

You'd be able to use the map to search for your local member of parliament down to the suburb.

So, you know, thousands and thousands of dots.

You would click on your local member of Parliament and an email that would pop up with their email address.

So that's the local member of Parliament, the state transport minister, and then the.

I think it was the Prime Minister's office.

Effectively all those emails would pop up and the email would effectively say, I use Uber.

I want Uber to be regulated in my state.

You know, please support this.

That was really all it said, you know, empowering our riders to share their voice.

And then we did similar with the drivers to actually share why they drove with Uber and the impact that they had.

And so if you think about, you know, that was quite a big lift with quite a lot of different features and functions.

And I'll take a moment to reference one of the greatest leaders I've worked with.

He sort of somewhat helped me with this idea and then he sat there for the whole night until we'd completed it and deployed it the next day.

And I just thought that was such a great lesson for a leader.

Anyway, and it was maybe 8, 9am the next day, no sleep, finally got all these emails set up and we were going out to hundreds of thousands of writers over overnight.

You know, close to a million, I think, at that point in time.

And, you know, we didn't know how many people were going to open the email, click to the blog, go to the map, click on their Member of Parliament, send that email at 9am, 10am Whenever the press conference was, we sent out the emails.

Now, we had also cc'd our support, so we can see every single email that was being sent.

And literally we had.

I think overall we got to 80,000 emails, but you could just see thousands and thousands and thousands of emails going.

And it was somewhat, you know, there was individuals that were receiving it, but then there was also the state body and then there was you know, national.

And for the most part we just saw the volumes come through.

Then we saw it stop in Queensland.

What had happened was that the Queensland government had effectively said, we'll stop any emails because they were getting such a volume.

We'll stop any emails that have Uber referenced.

Oh, wow.

And so there was must have been 20,000 emails that were blocked from actually being delivered.

Oh, my goodness.

And so the team got 20,000 letters printed out, put into envelopes, those envelopes put into hessian sacks, and then those sacks put onto a horse and cart and delivered up to the government building and held a press conference there, basically saying, look, if you're not going to listen to your constituents, we'll deliver their messages to you in a way that you'll understand.

So that sort of speaks to.

That's very cool.

Loving.

Yeah, that sort of speaks to the sort of mindset that everyone had was we stand for our riders, we stand for our drivers, we stand for the city.

And if people don't understand it, we'll do it in a way that people understand.

And I'm just thinking like of the comps team behind all that to being able to flex so quickly, to like, to saying that we're not going to just sit here and go, oh, it's not working.

You know, we're going to figure out a solution.

I love it.

Yeah, 100%.

I don't know if we had a fully fledged comms team at that point in time.

Just everybody on board.

Again, we were just steadfastly had the belief that it was going to be positive.

The thing that I'll end on around that is I often think back to what would happen if we stopped when we were told to stop.

And if that happened, Uber wouldn't exist.

It would probably be an interface that connects high cost taxi.

And so the fact that there was just this dogged mentality of this needs to happen, it's positive.

Not everything was positive, but the overall impact and net positive.

There is a bit of a learning there.

And again, one size doesn't fit all.

That's not a lesson for everyone, but I think for the most part you can look back and say it was a good decision.

Yeah.

Nice thinking about the people who are listening today.

Whether you're a business leader or a PR leader in your organization, you're getting ready to, to launch something that's new into the market.

Like looking back at your experience with Uber and I guess from a comms, PR stakeholder engagement, reputation trusts, what are some of the two or three Lessons that were the best lessons that you learned through that experience that you'd say would translate to other people doing similar things in the market.

It's a human focused role.

Right.

And what that means is there are moments where companies are just saying what they want to say and you're not saying what people want want to hear.

I think it's always important to really attach your messages to exactly what people are wanting to hear, make it relevant to them, be authentic.

And really to do that, I think it takes a specialist communications team, communications professionals that actually understand how to communicate a proposition so that it actually lands and is relevant.

That's something that I've taken through in my entire career.

I always come back to the sunlight test.

It's got to be authentic, it's got to be real.

The impact's got to be driven.

True.

That's something that I'll always never shy.

Away from in terms of, I mean, I guess backing yourself in that belief and that sort of like bullish attitude that was necessary at that time and the environment that enabled that to actually land for you.

I would suspect that there are a lot of brands disrupting markets now that are overwhelmed or almost paralyzed with fear and that vanilla is almost the default now because of the fear of being cancelled, the fear of exploding on Reddit in a moment.

And you know, that Mount Smart becoming just a moment on social media, that happens right now that you can never get back.

But I guess, where is the line?

I'll tell you a horror story.

Genuinely.

I mentioned that trust equals benefit of the doubt.

When you have trust, you can screw up and people will give you the benefit of the doubt based on your previous intentions or display of intentions.

When I say vanilla, it's not necessarily like, hey, I would try this channel or I would use this messaging.

It would be some of the decisions that we made that were very bold.

And I'm talking global Uber, the products that we put out.

A good example of that is search pricing.

That's now called dynamic pricing.

But really the problem there was Uber was at a certain price point that on nights out it was almost maxed out in terms of demand.

Just every single person wanted to ride home from the pub at the same time.

And so there were just not enough drops drivers.

And so dynamic pricing was similar to airlines, whereas if there's a lot of people looking for the same seat, the price will go up.

And that was clearly displayed in the app.

Might have been 1 or 2x3x quite high, sometimes 9x on New Year's for example, and there's some stories around that which didn't go down well.

And so there's those sort of things where like you don't make that pricing decision, that's quite a vanilla move.

But thousands and hundreds of thousands of people never get a trip.

And so that's a vanilla decision.

Positive reputational benefit, negative society benefit.

That's sort of what vanilla means.

Now surge pricing was not popular because it solved for the group.

Can the most number of people get a ride?

And can people who really, really need a ride at some point in time actually get that ride rather than just being zero?

But everyone felt it in the individually, which is a bit of a lesson.

So all the individual would feel was I just got changed eight times what I should have been charged.

And they don't see the benefit of actually got a car.

Right.

So that in itself was an example of a really poor move.

I can't actually recall it.

In Sydney, right in the cbd.

And effectively probably that area of Sydney was, was told to evacuate.

What did everyone do?

Everyone goes down to the road and opens up the Uber app and starts trying to get a lift out of it.

And so the Uber dynamic pricing just spiked, you know, and so, you know, people are saying like, okay, again, like really life threatening situation, need to get home.

Uber's now charging me seven times, eight times.

Well, yeah.

And so this was, you know, effectively an automated feedback that really reacted and the negative media was just almost immediate.

Uber takes advantage of people getting away from terrible scene.

And then we were all pretty running fast then and all quite junior and I think our social media manager at that point in time tweeted out like, don't worry, it's just dynamic pricing and it's designed, don't worry, designed to allow you to get home safe.

It's like, okay, that's the, the message.

But not, you know, right message, wrong time.

Anyway, and so the backlash was really actually affected the team quite significantly because it's kind of that case of like I'm trying to do the right thing, like we're not representing ourselves well because the intention was, was not that.

So quickly we turned it off, we sent more drivers and then we refunded every single trip out of the CBD during that period of time.

And we came out and said, look, that didn't work because it should have been more sorry, you know, but it was Just such a lesson of, like, if the mixture of, like, not having the benefit of the doubt, people not understanding the actual product, meaning dynamic pricing, means that you're just going to lose at some point in time.

Those are the trade offs for not making vanilla decisions.

Yeah, that's good.

Well, I think we could be here all day, so we might just leave it there.

But it's been an awesome talk with you, aj.

I've certainly learned a lot and I think, yeah, our listeners will, too.

So, yeah, thanks again for joining us.

I've had a wonderful time.

Wonderful walk down memory lane, so thank you so much for having me.

Yeah.

Cool.

You've redefined what a job in marketing could look like, right?

Yeah, totally.

Before we end our time together, we always end our podcast with a question about lunch, which is kind of random, but it's because crunch stands for crucial chats over lunch.

And so I was thinking about you getting ready to go to America, getting ready to go to Texas, which my husband's just come back from Texas, and the number of photos he sent me of eating barbecue.

But I wanted to ask you, I guess, sort of a double barrel question around lunch, what maybe are one of your favorite lunches that you have in America, but also what maybe kiwi lunches will you miss most?

I mean, there's only one right answer to that, and that's the thing that I'm looking forward to is Terry Black's barbecue.

Okay.

Austin.

I've been to Austin a few times and just every time is amazing.

You know, normally when you go and have a lot of food and it's a lot of meat, you.

It's like cognitive dissonance is the marketing term where you purchase something and then immediately after you've consumed it, you hate it and you hate yourself.

That's typically what barbecue is.

But for me, like, Terry Black's just so beautiful, so fresh, and you can eat a lot of it and you walk out and you're like, why do I feel so good?

It's like it's magic euphoria.

Yeah.

Anyway, keep this.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, why don't I hate myself right now?

Anyway, it was absolutely wonderful the last time.

And that's the thing I'm really looking forward to.

Right.

And a kiwi lunch that you'll miss the most.

Every few Sundays, we do a lunch with my grandma, 96 years old, until we get the.

The whole family there.

And so I'll miss my.

The lunches with my grandma.

Oh, that's typically fish and chips is the big one.

Oh, very cool.

Yeah.

Oh, for me, you can tell from my accent I'm from America originally, and I was just there, and I'm from Pennsylvania, and so.

So a famous Pennsylvania lunch would be a Philly cheesesteak.

I love a good Philly cheesesteak.

But then, yeah, in New Zealand, my favorite lunch probably is sushi.

When I go to America, I miss really good sushi in New Zealand, and I miss that when I go to America.

So.

Yeah.

It's almost like we're surrounded by water.

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

I struggled with lunch in America, I have to confess.

The bread was sweet and the cheese was orange and shiny or came out of a tube.

Oh, you get American cheese.

Yeah, I get it.

So I guess my lunch go to over there quickly became Mexican, because I think they do Mexican better than here on the whole.

Great.

Thanks again, aj.

Thank you for having me.

Look forward to next time.

Thanks for joining us today for Crunch, brought to you by New Zealand PR agency HO.

Be sure to tap the follow button so you don't miss our next episode.

See you next time.