< Previous Page
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Next Page >
Dave in 2023 - Continues to Gangbuster

In stark contrast to all of the stonewalling we had started to run into from Porsche Centre London and Porsche Euro Delivery, Dave Renner - our greatest fan and Porsche Ambassador out of Porsche Motor City in Detroit - he was still going gangbusters for us. In the course of his normal activities in January and February of 2023, corresponding with his contacts within the world of Porsche, he continued to advocate for us, inserting paragraphs in his emails mentioning us, pointing out that we had our allocations, and that we were still interested in doing some sort of mutually-beneficial media collaboration. He would also run draft emails by us, asking us for our input, before sending them off. He even at times would ask us to give us an entire block of text that he would then personally forward off to some contact or other.

It was a hopeful thing for us, seeing this advocacy happen, and we were very grateful - but nothing so far had really yet "clicked" (as in, us actually establishing a line of communication). Dave had been mentioning us more or less continuously to his Porsche AG contacts for eight or nine months now, but with no real acknowledgement of The GTS Chronicles. However, on February 4, 2023, one of his most frequent contacts - Paul Gregor in Porsche Global Community Management (in Germany) sent this in one of his replies to Dave:

[...] As for your Canadian friends... pls give them my contact details and invite them to contact me directly. I'd love to see how I can support them.

Ciao!

That was new: a direct invitation for us to introduce ourselves! Would this be our chance to convince Porsche Corporate in Germany that a little media collaboration might be worthwhile?

In our texts, you can sense a bit of excitement:

From: Luke Ward - Feb 4, 2023, 8:31 PM
Reply to Dave from Paul!

From: Andrew Lavigne - Feb 4, 2023, 8:31 PM
ooo

From: Andrew Lavigne - Feb 4, 2023, 8:31 PM
good answer from him

From: Andrew Lavigne - Feb 4, 2023, 8:32 PM
" As for your Canadian friends - pls give them my contact details and invite them to contact me directly. I'd love to see how I can support them. "

From: Andrew Lavigne - Feb 4, 2023, 8:32 PM
well, la-dee-da. We certainly will.


Within about ninety minutes of receiving that email, I had a draft email ready, introducing Luke and I and The GTS Chronicles to Paul. And after a couple of rounds of edits, we sent it off, at 10:21pm that night:

Hi Paul,

My name is Andrew Lavigne. I am introducing myself and my friend Luke Ward through our shared connection, Dave Renner.

We are not sure if you've had a chance to review our GTS Chronicles initiative, but basically we are a couple of long-time sportscar enthusiasts who want to capture the human interest side of a European Delivery experience with Porsche.

An attractive angle to our story is that we're getting two GTS 4.0 models - one for myself and one for my buddy Luke. They are nearly symmetrical, both in Carmine Red. The only major difference is that one is a Cayman and one is a Boxster.

We're very road-trip oriented, so our story will be about the ups and downs, challenges and over comings of an extended exploration across Europe, together, with our two cars.

We've been doing a very large amount of preparation for the storytelling that we want to do around this experience. We're thinking that the specifics of our story might be of interest in terms of creating some content in which Porsche might be interested.

We're not looking to sell or increase our media presence or anything like that - we are just passionate about motorsport and storytelling and think the creation of the content that tells our story could be even better with guidance from Porsche's media or marketing teams. And we are happy to freely share any useful content that comes out of such a collaboration.

We recently received our allocations and are currently slotted for European Delivery in July of this year.

If you have not already done so, we encourage you to view our overview page at

https://gtschronicles.com

and our timeline-based instagram feed, available at

https://instagram.com/gtschronicles

Especially of note is the 'pitch' video (which is essentially our video explanation to Porsche describing us and what we are looking for). It is contained within the above GTS Chronicles page, but also available directly here for your convenience:

https://vimeo.com/706403745

As you can see from the above video, we're very meticulous - just like Porsche!

If you are interested, we'd be more than happy to engage in an exploratory conversation, or otherwise answer any questions you may have.

Sincerely and appreciatively,

Andrew Lavigne and Luke Ward


That was a pretty hopeful moment back at the beginning of February, finally having the privilege to actually initiate a conversation with someone official, *and* someone who was not in the chain-of-process associated with our dealer.

Unfortunately, by the end of February, we still hadn't heard anything back from Paul. We didn't know exactly why, of course, but, there was always the possibility that he simply had not had time to fully bottom out any possible connections on his end. In any case, we were obviously a little less fizzed about it at this point, but ... eh ... that was life.

Completely separate from the initiatives championed by Dave, one of the owners / moderators of the carpokes.com Porsche forum - Larry - had suggested that we contact 000 (triple-zero) magazine. 000 (website here) is a very upscale Porsche enthusiast magazine where each issue is something like the size of a phone book, costs a hundred bucks (again per issue), and only is published infrequently. Larry felt that the publishers had an "in" with Porsche and liked to dig deep into all things Porsche. He thought that our story (i.e. The GTS Chronicles story) could result in an article in an upcoming issue.

Larry: have you thought about contacting the folks at 000 magazine? They have an "in" with Porsche and like to dig deep into all things Porsche. I would think your story alone could result in an article in an upcoming 000 issue.

Andrew: OOO.... Is that a magazine? Must look....
Ah, I see. Triple-Zero. 260 page magazine? Geez. So is this ultra-premium or something? Like the Tag-Heuer of magazines ?

Ohhh ... *That's* where the 000 Spyder comes from. Got it....

And you think they might really be interested? I wonder what the best way is to contact them....

Larry: 000 is a high end Porsche magazine. Each issue is three pounds and cost around $50.00. I've called and chatted with one of the two owners, Alex Palevsky in the past. You can call them or send a message. I would call. They are always on the lookout for good story pitches and yours is the best.


An example issue of triple-zero (0-0-0) magazine.
Larry had suggested that a call with one of the owners of the magazine might be best. First, however, we crafted a variant of our collaboration proposal email and we sent that off to them. Eventually I myself summoned up the courage to call, but I only ever ended up getting a voice mailbox (where I left I short verbal version of our pitch). Eventually we did hear back from 0-0-0 magazine, a nicely-worded note that politely declined our offer, stating that they did not think the story we wanted to tell would fit in with what they were planning to publish in their upcoming issues. Slightly disappointing, to be sure, but I give many positive points to the magazine for actually answering. If we had learned anything from our long journey trying to get engagement, it was that a nicely-worded answer in the negative is far preferable, and much more honorable, then silence. It feels nice to be acknowledged and heard. And to be frank, to be able to know not to pester any further!

I actually didn't end up calling 0-0-0 magazine in February (I didn't really have the energy/courage to do it at the time), but later on at the end of June, I did (which you'll read about later). They declined, for the record, but you'll read why when you get to that part.

And so, by the end of February 2023, our actual successes at reaching out an establishing a collaboration numbered exactly ... zero. Which was, to be fair, had always been the most likely outcome. In the end, we always knew that we would be making and recording something great for ourselves, by ourselves, regardless of whether or not we got to do any official collaboration work. It was important for us to remember that.

It was time for us to de-emphasize this collaboration drive. We had a pretty solid, high-probability delivery date now - a date that was four and a half months away. And if we were going to pull off this ambitious trip, with totally self-made media, then we had a lot of prep to do. Time to get to it!
< Previous Page
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Next Page >
Send feedback or leave comments (note: comments in message board below are separate from those in above message board)
send feedback | homemade custom message board
(Message Board failed to initialize. )
Web Page & Design Copyright 2001- 2025 by Andrew Lavigne. (Privacy Policy)