To draw attention to the Mini Cooper’s superior engineering, we created a character named Dr. Colin Mayhew and “leaked” his clandestine website, www.r50rd.co.uk, to science and engineering industry blogs. Through this site, people entered the world of our retired Mini engineer who decided to make the roads much safer by designing robots to defend motorists. To make them, he used the technology he knew best, constructing the heroic, larger-than-life robots from Mini components. They were programmed to repair flat tyres, plug parking meters, rescue stranded motorists and prevent accidents.

Links to Dr. Mayhew’s website were seeded onto science and engineering web blogs. As interest grew, so did the distribution of his site contents onto larger electronic and robotic sites. With online buzz spreading, we inserted 6.1 million print pieces entitled, Men of Metal: Eyewitness Accounts of Humanoid Robots, into national magazines. In this book, which detailed robot sightings near Oxford, England, author Rowland Samuel discusses Dr. Mayhew’s robotic experiments and hypothesises that they might be linked to the eyewitness accounts he’s learned of near Oxford. As Mini consumers continue to explore this story of interactive fiction, they’re rewarded with more websites from Dr. Mayhew, Rowland Samuel and the book’s publisher.