It’s the week before Christmas in 2018 and Gatwick airport has been reduced to a standstill because of reported drone sightings. For James Meredith, director at Liberty Comms, this week was usually a time for quiet reflection, admin and maybe even chipping off early – it was definitely not a time to change public perceptions of drones.

At the time, Meredith had roughly a year’s experience with the agency as senior account director and at precisely 9pm on 19th December 2018 – “I remember this quite vividly,” Meredith enthuses – and a Gatwick security guard has set the alarm to say he’d seen two drones.

"It was a bit mad."

On 20th December, attempts to reopen the runway were blighted by further reported drone sightings in and around the airport from various professionals and members of the public.

“It was a bit mad, it ended up being one of the biggest disruptions Gatwick had seen since the airport fully closed with the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruptions,” he says.

“Flights resumed on 21st December and the police [wrongfully] arrested two people, who were later released without charge. By April 2019, police were speculating if the disruption was an inside job and to this day nobody has been found responsible. People suspect this was a hoax.

An airport full of passengers grounded over the holidays as a result of one of those newfangled drones meant the headlines basically wrote themselves, and this was potentially bad news for one of Liberty’s clients, who had skin in the drone game.

The moment

“Liberty were working with a client in the drone space,” he explains that the client didn’t make drones but had a B2B tech solution to alert air traffic control towers to the presence of drones.

“We had some conversations with the client [prior to the Gatwick incident] on coverage. Reported drone sightings around airports on the news actually happen more often than you think. We didn't want to jump on every reported drone sighting because there’s these negative connotations with disruption, and they didn’t want to be associated with negative drone stories.

“[When we realised] it wasn't just a one off sighting and had been ongoing for 24 hours, we had a discussion and decided to jump on it, but shift the narrative to a more positive perspective. We came up with the Drones for Good campaign to engage the conversation and display that drones can be safely integrated into society and the positive use cases.

“It was like oh my goodness me, we are really full throttle with this, right up to and including Christmas Eve trying to get commentary out there, everyone was still writing about this.”

This wasn’t an easy aspiration. Competition was fierce as every major news outlet nationally and internationally had its sights on Gatwick Airport, but Meredith and the Liberty team managed to peg down research from the likes of PwC about the potential increase to UK GDP from drone tech, the cost savings it could deliver and the boost it could deliver to the nation's productivity, which beefed out the campaign.

“That was just the starting point,” he says, as then all similar events around the world became headline news. Meredith recalls reports of drone sightings in airports across the globe, from New Jersey to Dubai which “provided us with an opportunity to keep that news cycle going".

There was then a second phase of follow-up coverage utilising experts to discuss potential reasons for why it happened, and how it can be prevented in the future. This was featured in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and various trade publications and eventually won the agency a few industry and trade press awards for its efforts, including a shortlist for the PRmoment Award’s Automotive and Transport Marketing Communications Campaign of the Year.

The takeaway

Meredith says that the experience taught him that sometimes you need to do the total opposite of what was initially discussed.

“The main learning I took from it was that you have to be willing to be flexible with your strategy and approach,” he explains.

“We had this thought process that we don't want to touch negative drone stories because of the connotations and public perception, and actually we flipped that. I’ve now learned that it's about having that [willingness to adapt] in mind when you’re strategising and thinking about what your approach is going to be.

“With the news cycle, anything can break that might be relevant to your client, and you might have to look at it and change the strategy. You can't be set in your ways and stuck to a position because you may well have to change your approach – rapidly.”