Bell built military helicopters. They wanted to be known as a technology thought leader.
The aircraft existed. The Uber partnership existed. What did not exist was anyone outside aviation filing Bell under the future of transportation. So I built the stage where that reclassification could happen, and put Bell on it twice.
- Role
- Marketing & PR Manager, Real Chemistry
- Context
- Bell Flight, formerly Bell Helicopter, was building toward urban air mobility while the market still filed it under military aviation - a defense contractor with a concept, not a technology company.
- Business question
- How does a defense manufacturer get counted as a technology company building the future of transportation?
- What I owned
- Panel concepts and SXSW submissions
- Speaker recruitment
- Every discussion question
- Vendor coordination and on-site execution
- Media outreach, live social, and follow-up
- Methods
- Category framing
- Programming and speaker curation
- Question design
- Event production
- Media relations and real-time social
Attribution. Agency work delivered for Bell Flight while I was at Real Chemistry. The panel program is my workstream - I wrote the submissions, recruited the speakers, wrote the questions, and ran the sessions. Bell's experiential activation at SXSW was not mine. The Nexus air taxi display and the VR vertiport experience on Rainey Street were separate work by other teams, and nothing on this page claims them. Product development and business outcomes are likewise not claimed.
The problem was not awareness. It was which category Bell was filed under.
Bell had a real claim to urban air mobility - the engineering, the Uber partnership, the Nexus aircraft. What it did not have was membership in the set of companies the market thinks of as building the future. Technology media, policymakers, investors, and the mainstream innovation audience knew Bell as a defense and rotorcraft manufacturer, and everything the company said about air taxis was heard through that filter.
Why the obvious approach fails
Announcing an aircraft to aviation trade media reaches readers who already knew. Buying presence at SXSW - a booth, a demo, a sponsored session - reaches a mainstream audience but reads as marketing, and mainstream reporters do not cover marketing.
Either route ends with Bell talking about Bell, which is exactly the thing that does not travel - and neither one changes the category the company is filed under.
The move I made instead
Build a session about the category question, not the company: are flying taxis actually happening, and what would have to be true for them to work?
That question is genuinely contested, which makes it programmable by SXSW, attractive to serious speakers, and coverable by real journalists. Bell earns standing by being one credible voice in the argument rather than the subject of it - and gets sorted, by the company it keeps on stage, into the technology set rather than the defense set.
Death to Roadways: Ending Traffic with Flying Cars
The title does the strategic work. It is a claim, not a topic - provocative enough to get programmed, broad enough that NASA and McKinsey could join without endorsing a vendor, and framed around a public problem rather than an aircraft.
It became an NPR story.
The session was moderated by NPR technology correspondent Aarti Shahani, who then reported it for Weekend Edition Sunday on March 17, 2019. The piece takes its central device from the room itself: she asked the audience who believed flying taxis were four years away, and reported what happened when they raised their hands. The rest of this case is how that session got built.
Six steps. At each one, someone had to say yes.
SXSW had to accept the topic. Four people with no obligation to Bell had to agree to sit on the panel. Reporters had to decide the session was worth their time at a festival running two thousand of them. None of that existed when I started.
- 01
Develop the topic
Found the version of the urban air mobility argument that was contested, current, and framed around traffic rather than aircraft - a public problem an audience already cared about.
- 02
Write and win the SXSW submission
Wrote the proposal and secured its acceptance into the SXSW programming schedule, against a submission pool where most proposals are declined.
- 03
Recruit every speaker
Assembled a lineup spanning government, consulting, industry, and journalism - none of whom were obliged to participate, and each of whom needed a different reason to say yes.
- 04
Write the discussion
Authored the full question set and run of show, structured so the disagreement between speakers was productive rather than polite.
- 05
Produce the session
Coordinated vendors and on-site logistics so the panel actually happened as designed during the busiest week in Austin.
- 06
Earn and extend the coverage
Ran media outreach around the session, live-tweeted it as it happened, and handled follow-up with reporters afterward.
Credibility by composition.
That table in Fig. 01 is the whole argument. A government research administrator, a management consultant, an industry executive, and a national technology correspondent moderating - a combination that makes the category look real and makes any single company's claims checkable. None of them had to say yes.
| Speaker | Organization | Why they mattered to the argument |
|---|---|---|
| Aarti Shahani | NPR - moderator | A national technology correspondent moderating meant the session was journalism, not promotion - and put the story inside a newsroom rather than beside it. |
| Jaiwon Shin | NASA, Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate | Government research authority. If NASA is working on it, the category is not speculative. |
| Shivika Sahdev | McKinsey & Company | The economics and the market case, from a source with no product to sell. |
| Michael Thacker | Bell | The client - present as the party actually building the aircraft, not as the headline. |
The recruitment problem
None of these people needed a vendor's panel. NASA and McKinsey in particular cannot appear to endorse a manufacturer, and a national correspondent will not moderate a marketing session.
Why the framing solved it
Because the session was about whether the category was real, each speaker could participate on their own terms and disagree openly. The neutrality that made it recruitable is the same neutrality that made it credible - and it is why Bell benefited more than a Bell-branded session would have.
Two sessions, two audiences, one executive.
Bell appeared on two SXSW 2019 panels I coordinated, on consecutive days, in two different registers. One argued the consumer future. The other argued the regulatory reality. Michael Thacker sat on both - which is how a single executive becomes a category voice rather than a company spokesman.
| Session | When | On stage | The argument it made |
|---|---|---|---|
| Death to Roadways: Ending Traffic with Flying Cars | Mar 13 Fairmont |
Aarti Shahani (NPR, moderator) · Jaiwon Shin (NASA) · Shivika Sahdev (McKinsey) · Michael Thacker (Bell) | Is this real, and when? The consumer and cultural case, pitched at a mainstream innovation audience. |
| Up Next in Transportation: Flying Cars and Drones? | Mar 12 Intelligent Future track |
Jamie Boone (Consumer Technology Association) · Danielle Burr (Uber) · Michael Thacker (Bell) | What has to change first? The policy, economic, social, environmental, and legal barriers to urban air mobility. |
What sat alongside this, and was not mine
Bell's wider SXSW 2019 presence included its Nexus air taxi concept - unveiled earlier that year at CES - and an experiential activation on Rainey Street with a simulated vertiport and a VR flight experience. That activation was built and run by other teams. I did not work on it. It appears here only as the context the panels sat inside, so that a reader who finds it knows which part was mine.
Why the second panel mattered
The consumer story establishes that a category is exciting. The policy story establishes that it is survivable. Urban air mobility in 2019 was blocked less by engineering than by airspace regulation, certification, and public acceptance - so a company that could only speak to the first half would have looked naive to the audience that actually decides.
The second session put Bell beside Uber's federal affairs leadership and the Consumer Technology Association, in a partner track programmed around U.S. Department of Transportation participation.
What the pairing produced
Across two days Bell was the company present in both conversations: the one about what the future feels like, and the one about what it will take to get there legally.
That is a materially different position from appearing once. It is the difference between a company with a concept aircraft and a company treated as part of the infrastructure discussion.
From defense contractor to a company building the future of transportation.
This was the actual objective. Bell's problem was not awareness - it was category membership. The company was filed under military aviation, and everything it said about urban air mobility was heard through that filter. The panel was the mechanism for moving it into a different set.
What the coverage shows
NPR's piece names both identities in the same breath: the company that makes attack helicopters for the U.S. Navy, and the company working on this new project with Uber. That sentence is the repositioning happening in real time, written by a journalist rather than asserted by the brand.
The segment also carries a Bell engineer explaining the autonomy problem - the company appearing as a technical authority on a hard question, which is how technology companies are covered and defense contractors usually are not.
Why the format produced it
- Company by association. Seated with NASA, McKinsey, and Uber's ambitions, Bell is sorted into the future-of-transportation set rather than the defense set. Membership is conferred by the company you keep on a stage.
- Subject matter over self-description. Bell spoke about autonomy, batteries, and airspace rather than about Bell. Talking like a technology company is more convincing than claiming to be one.
- Venue as signal. SXSW is where categories get legitimized. Being programmed there, rather than exhibiting, places a company inside the innovation conversation.
- Consumer frame. Framing the argument around traffic, not aircraft, moved Bell into a story about how people will live - the register technology companies occupy.
What I can evidence is the coverage and the composition. I do not have brand-tracking data, so I am not claiming a measured shift in how audiences perceived Bell - only that the program was designed to produce this repositioning and that the resulting national coverage carries it.
The client was never the story. That is why the story ran.
Bell appears in a national technology segment as one of the companies building the thing, alongside NASA and McKinsey, in a piece a journalist wanted to make. No announcement, no sponsorship, and no press release could have bought that position.
Building the platform rather than pitching into someone else's.
Most earned-media work is persuasion after the fact: something exists, and the job is to convince a reporter it matters. This was the opposite. The asset did not exist until I made it, and the coverage followed because the asset was genuinely worth covering.
The transferable judgment is the framing decision. A company with low category permission gains more from convening a credible argument than from asserting a position inside it - and the neutrality that feels like giving something up is precisely what makes it work.
What I would measure now
In 2019 this was reported as a placement. The questions I would ask today:
- Share of category voice - Bell's presence in urban air mobility coverage before and after, against Uber, Boeing, and Airbus
- Message penetration - what share of resulting coverage positioned Bell as a builder rather than a helicopter manufacturer
- Audience composition - who attended and who engaged with the live coverage, against the policymaker and investor audiences the program targeted
Notes & sources
- Coverage. NPR, "Flying Taxis. Seriously?", reported by Aarti Shahani, broadcast on Weekend Edition Sunday, March 17, 2019, and syndicated across NPR member stations. The published piece names the panel and reports the audience show of hands, and quotes NASA's Jaiwon Shin on the convergence of technologies making the category viable.
- Fig. 01 is a still from SXSW's own recording of the session.
- Fig. 02 is a layout recreation, not a screenshot. It reproduces the headline, date, program, and byline of the real article for display purposes. The original is linked above and should be treated as the source of record.
- Panel composition as recorded by me. NPR's published piece independently confirms the panel title, the moderator, and Jaiwon Shin's participation.
- SXSW 2019 figures - 725 panel sessions within 2,128 total conference sessions, 73,716 conference attendees, 106 countries, and 4,331 media and press - are taken from SXSW's official 2019 Event Statistics. They describe the conference, not audience delivered by this session.
- Submission record. Three panel submissions written for SXSW 2019; two accepted. Both accepted sessions are documented above.
- Second session. "Up Next in Transportation: Flying Cars and Drones?", SXSW 2019, March 12, Intelligent Future track, listed as Partner Programming under the U.S. Department of Transportation’s SXSW presence. Speakers and description per the official SXSW 2019 schedule. Its placement route differs from an open PanelPicker submission and is described accordingly.
- Attribution. Agency work at Real Chemistry for Bell Flight. The panel program is my workstream; Bell's wider SXSW presence and business results are not claimed.