IMAGINE for a moment you are the public relations manager for a car maker launching an important new product at a major international motor show.

The reveal is stunning, the audience applause deafening and the press kit written to perfection.  Except that somehow, the electronic image files that are the visual explanation for everything are corrupted.

To make matters worse, the disaster is only realised after the reveal, when journalists are rushing to file copy.  Suddenly, you are having a very bad day.

That scenario played out for Subaru soon after the Japanese car maker announced its ground-breaking Subaru Global Platform, a design leap that will form the basis of all its cars for generations to come, at the Geneva Motor Show.

An electronic "bug" in Subaru Australia's online press kit threatened to cause major problems for the company and when some users tried to open the images though they were found to be different in every detail in comparison to the originals.

What should have been sharply detailed photographic representations of the new platform, with the key areas highlighted in gold and all of it set against a white background, instead showed as rough, blurred, almost pencil-drawn yellow outlines on a black background.

Subaru Australia is a client of automotive news hosting site Autodeadline, a company for which crisis aversion is all in a day's work.

Autodeadline's editorial desk handles dozens of electronic files daily and was able to run an instant fix, ensuring Subaru's information was posted correctly on both the Autodeadline site and in the company's own Subaru Newsroom.

Autodeadline's Paul Pearson said when he tried to access the images using Photoshop he was given an 'error' message, indicating a corrupted file denying him access.

"I ran (the files) through our usual image processing software to resolve the issue and loaded them onto Autodeadline along with the media release," Mr Pearson said, adding that correcting damaged supplied images is common practice for Autodeadline.

"We fix these as a matter of routine," he said. "After correcting the Subaru images I downloaded them from both the Subaru Newsroom site and Autodeadline, opening them without problems and displaying properly."

In fact by the time David Rowley, Subaru Australia's National Corporate Affairs Manager, spotted the problem and contacted Autodeadline to warn of the issues, the corrected images were already up on the site.

Mr Rowley said the images sent by Subaru parent company Fuji Heavy Industries "looked clean" but opened in a different manner to that anticipated, suggesting some level of IT problem.

"The Autodeadline guys ran it through their lightbox and fixed it up so that, in the eyes of the end user, there was never a problem. They detected it, they fixed it and it was a good outcome.

"It seems simple but for us it meant either no stories being written about our future cars or stories being published (without images) and readers having to visualise what was written."

The bottom line? What was essentially just a routine day in the office for Autodeadline was a big save for Subaru.