A UK PR agency pitching to run an account for Ola has proposed operating a marketing campaign to politicize ride-hailing as a tactic to shift rules in its favor.
The strategy means that, regardless of the looks of ride-hailing platforms taking a extra conciliatory place with regulators that are actually clever to earlier startup techniques on this house, there stays a calculus involving realpolitik, propaganda and high-level lobbying between firms that wish to enter or develop in markets, and people who maintain the golden tickets to take action.
In 2017 Estonia-based ride-hailing startup Taxify tried to launch in London forward of regulatory approval, for instance, however metropolis authorities clamped down immediately. It was solely in a position to return to the UK capital 21 months later (now often known as Bolt).
In Western markets ride-hailing firms are going through outdated and new regulatory roadblocks which might be driving up prices and creating obstacles to progress. In some cases unfavorable rule modifications have even led firms to tug out of cities or areas all collectively. Even as there are ongoing questions across the employment classification of the drivers these platforms rely on to ship a service.
The PR pitch, made by a Tufton Street-based PR agency referred to as Public First, suggests Ola sort out legislative friction in UK areas with a coverage affect marketing campaign focused at native voters.
The SoftBank-backed Indian ride-hailing startup launched within the U.Ok. in August, 2018 and at present affords providers in a handful of regional places together with South Wales, Merseyside and the West Midlands. Most not too long ago it gained a licence to function in London, and final month launched providers in Coventry and Warwick — saying then that passengers within the UK had clocked up a couple of million journeys since its launch.
Manchester can also be on its goal checklist — and options as a spotlight within the technique proposal — although an Ola spokesman advised us it has no launch date for the town but. The firm met with Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, throughout a commerce mission to India final month.

The Public First proposal suggests a spread of methods for Ola to get native authorities and native politicians on-side, and thus keep away from issues in potential and future operations, together with the usage of engagement campaigns and digital concentrating on to mobilize choose coalitions round politicized, self-serving speaking factors — corresponding to claims that public transport is much less protected and handy; or that air high quality improves if fewer folks drive into the town — as a way to generate strain on regulators to alter licensing guidelines.
Another suggestion is to place the corporate much less as a enterprise, and extra as a company representing tens of hundreds of time-poor folks.
Public First advocates usually for the usage of data- and technology-driven marketing campaign strategies, corresponding to microtargeted digital promoting, as more practical than direct lobbying of native authorities officers — suggesting utilizing digital instruments to generate a notion that a problem is politicized will encourage elected representatives to do the heavy lifting of pressuring regulators as a result of they’ll be involved about dropping votes.
The agency describes digital marketing campaign parts as “crucial” to this technique.
“Through a small, targeted online digital advertising campaign in both cities, local councillors’ email inboxes would begin to fill with requests from a number of different people (students, businesses, and other members of [a commuter advocacy group it proposes setting up to act as a lobby vehicle]) for the local authority to change its approach on local taxi licensing — in effect, to make it easier for Ola to launch,” it affords as a proposed technique for constructing momentum behind Ola in Manchester and Liverpool.
Public First confirmed it made the pitch to Ola however advised us: “This was merely a routine, speculative proposal of the sort we generate all the time as we meet people.”
“Ola Cabs has no relationship whatsoever with Public First,” it added.
A spokesperson for Ola additionally confirmed that it doesn’t have a enterprise relationship with Public First. “Ola has never had a relationship with Public First, does not currently have one and nor will it in the future,” the spokesman advised us.
“Ola’s approach in the UK has been defined by working closely and collaborating with local authorities and we are committed to being fully licensed in every area we operate,” he added, suggesting the technique it’s making use of is the alternative of what’s being proposed.
We perceive that previous to Public First pitching their concepts to an individual working in Ola’s comms division, Ola’s director of authorized, compliance and regulation, Andrew Winterton, met with the agency over espresso — in an introductory capability. But that no such techniques have been mentioned.
It seems that, following first contact, Public First took the initiative to attract up the technique suggesting politicizing ride-hailing in key goal areas which it emailed to Winterton however solely offered to a extra junior Ola worker in a follow-up assembly the authorized director didn’t attend.
Ola has constructed a significant ride-hailing enterprise in its house market of India — by means of $3.8BN in funding and aggressive competitors. Since 2018 it has been taking worldwide steps to gas extra progress. In the U.Ok. its strategy so far has been pretty low key, going to cities and regional facilities outdoors of high-profile London first, in addition to aiming to serve areas with huge Indian populations to assist recruit riders and drivers.
It’s a method that’s probably been knowledgeable by having the ability to view the observe report of present ride-hailing gamers — and keep away from Uber-style regulatory blunders.
The tech big was dealt a significant shock by London’s transport regulator in 2017, when TfL denied it a licence renewal — citing considerations over Uber’s strategy to passenger security and company governance, together with querying its clarification for utilizing proprietary software program that might be used to evade regulatory oversight.
The Uber story seems to be the excessive water mark for blitzscaling startup techniques that relied on ignoring or brute forcing regulators within the ride-hailing class. Laws and native authorities have largely caught up. The title of the sport now’s discovering methods to get regulators on aspect.
Propaganda as a service
The indisputable fact that strategic proposals corresponding to Public First’s to Ola are thought-about routine sufficient to place right into a speculative pitch is attention-grabbing, given how the shortage of transparency round the usage of on-line instruments for spreading propaganda is a matter that’s now troubling elected representatives in parliaments all around the world. Tools corresponding to these supplied by Facebook’s advert platform.
In Facebook’s case the corporate offers solely restricted visibility into who’s operating political and issue-based adverts on its platform. The concentrating on standards getting used to succeed in people can also be not comprehensively disclosed.
Some of the corporate’s personal workers not too long ago went public with considerations that its superior concentrating on and behavioral-tracking instruments make it “hard for people in the electorate to participate in the public scrutiny that we’re saying comes along with political speech”, as they put it.
At the identical time, platforms offering a conduit for company pursuits to cheaply and simply manufacture ‘politicized’ speech seems to be one other under-scrutinized threat for democratic societies.
Among the providers Public First lists on its web site are “policy development”, “qualitative and quantitative opinion research”, “issues-based campaigns”, “coalition-building” and “war gaming”. (Here, for instance, is a bit of labor the agency carried out for Google — the place its analysis-for-hire ends in a puffy declare that the tech big’s digital providers are value a minimum of $70BN in annual “economic value” for the UK.)
Public First’s selection of workplace location, in Tufton Street, London, can also be notable as the realm is house to an interlinked hub of right-leaning suppose tanks, such because the free market Center for Policy Studies and pro-Brexit Initiative for Free Trade. These are foyer autos dressed up as coverage wonks which put out narratives meant to affect public opinion and laws in a selected route with out it being clear who their monetary backers are.
Some of the publicity methods concerned in this sort of work seem to share similarities with techniques utilized by Big Tobacco to foyer in opposition to anti-smoking laws, or fossil gas pursuits’ funding of disinformation and astroturfing operations to create a notion of doubt round consensus local weather science.
“A lot of what used to get sold in this space essentially was access [to policymakers],” says one former public relations skilled, talking on background. “What you’re seeing an increasingly amount of now is the ‘technification’ of that process. Everyone’s using those kinds of tools — clearly in terms of trying to understand public sentiment better and that kind of thing… But essentially what they’re saying is we can set up a set of politicized issues so that they can benefit you. And that’s an interesting change. It’s not just straight defence and attack; promote your brand vs another. It’s ‘okay, we’re going to change the politics around an issue… in order to benefit your outcome’. And that’s fairly sophisticated and interesting.”
Mat Hope, editor of investigative journalism outlet DeSmog — which stories on climate-related misinformation campaigns — has executed numerous work targeted on Tufton Street particularly, wanting on the impression the community’s ‘policy-costumed’ company speaking factors have had on UK democracy.
“There is a set of organisations based out of offices in and around 55 Tufton Street in Westminster, just around the corner from the Houses of Parliament, which in recent years have had an outsized impact on British democracy. Many of the groups were at the forefront of the Leave campaign, and are now pushing for a hard or no-deal Brexit,” he advised us, noting that Public First not solely has workplaces close by however that its founders and workers “have strong ties to other organisations based there”.
“The groups regularly lobby politicians in the interests of specific companies or big industry through the guise of grassroots or for-the-people campaigns,” he added. “One way they do this is through targeting adverts or social media posts, using groups with benign sounding names. This makes it hard to trace the campaign back to any particular company, and gives the issue an impression of grassroots support that is, on the whole, artificial.”
Platform energy with out duty
Ad platforms corresponding to Facebook which revenue by profiling folks provide low cost but highly effective instruments for company pursuits to determine and goal extremely particular sub-sets of voters. This is feasible due to the huge quantities of non-public information they acquire — an exercise that’s lastly coming below vital regulatory scrutiny — and customized advert instruments corresponding to lookalike audiences, all of which permits behavioral microtargeting on the particular person consumer/voter degree.
Lookalike audiences is a strong advert product that permits Facebook advertisers to add buyer information but additionally leverage the corporate’s pervasive people-profiling to entry new audiences that they don’t maintain information on however who’ve related traits to their goal. These so-called lookalike audiences will be tightly geotargeted, in addition to zeroed in on granular pursuits and demographics. It’s not arduous to see how such instruments will be utilized to selectively hit up solely the voters probably to align with a enterprise’ pursuits.
The upshot is that a web based advertiser is ready to pay little to faucet into the population-scale attain and huge information wealth of platform giants — turning firehose energy in opposition to particular person voters who they deem — through focus group work or different voter information evaluation — to be aligned with a company agenda. The platform turns into a propaganda machine for manufacturing the looks of broad public engagement and grassroots advocacy for a self-interested coverage change.
The goal voter, in the meantime, is probably none the wiser about why they’re seeing politicized messaging. It’s that lack of transparency that makes the exercise inherently anti-democratic.
The UK’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee raised Facebook’s lookalike audiences as a threat to democracy throughout a latest enquiry into on-line disinformation and digital campaigning. It went on to advocate an outright ban on political microtargeting to lookalike audiences on-line. Though the UK authorities has thus far didn’t act on that or its fuller suite of suggestions. (Nor has Facebook responded to more and more loud calls from politicians and civic society to ban political and problem adverts altogether.)
Even a code of conduct printed by the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) emphasizes transparency — with member organizations committing to “be open and transparent in declaring their name, organisation and the interest they represent”. (Albeit, the IPRA’s member checklist will not be itself public.)
While on-line concentrating on of social media customers stays a significant drawback for democracies, on account of the shortage of transparency and particular person consent to concentrating on (or, certainly, to data-based profiling), in recent times we’ve additionally seen extra direct efforts by firms to make use of their very own know-how instruments to generate voter strain.
Examples corresponding to ride-hailing big Uber which, below its founding CEO, Travis Kalanick, grew to become well-known for a ‘push button’ strategy to mobilizing its consumer base by sending calls to motion to foyer in opposition to unfavorable regulatory modifications.
Airbnb has additionally sought to make use of its platform-reach to beat in opposition to native authority rule modifications that threaten its ‘home sharing’ enterprise mannequin.
However it’s the opaque tech-fuelled concentrating on enabled by advert platforms like Facebook that’s way more problematic for democracies because it permits vested pursuits to generate self-interested strain remotely — together with from overseas — whereas remaining totally shielded from view.
Fixing this may require regulatory muscle to implement present legal guidelines round private information assortment (a minimum of the place such legal guidelines exist) — and doing so in a means that forestalls microtargeting from being a budget promoting default. Democracies mustn’t enable their residents to be mirrored within the information as a result of it units them as much as be hollowed out; their people aggregated, categorised and repackaged as all-you-can-eat consideration models for whoever is paying.
And probably additionally laws to set agency boundaries round the usage of political and campaigning/problem adverts on-line. Turning platform energy in opposition to the person is inherently asymmetrical. It’s by no means going to be a good struggle. So truthful floor guidelines for digital political campaigning — and a correct oversight regime to implement them — are completely important.
Another democratic tonic is transparency. Which means elevating consciousness about tech-fuelled techniques which might be designed to generate and exploit data-based asymmetries as a way to hack and manipulate public opinion. Such skewed stuff solely actually works when the goal is oblivious to what’s afoot. In that respect, each little disclosure of those ‘dark arts’ and the platforms that allow them offers a much-needed counter increase for important pondering and democracy.