Bobcat · Creative Director, Agency of Record · 2008–2011
Twenty years of stagnation. One campaign that ran for six.
Bobcat hadn't launched a meaningful new product in two decades. The M-series was the breakthrough. The brief was to make a one-ton machine feel inevitable to millions of buyers without flying any of them to a job site. I directed the campaign that did it. Six years later it was still running.
3,300+
media sites picked up the campaign
1M+
video views
$2M
client reinvestment to extend campaign
6 yrs
campaign longevity
The challenge
After 20 years of incremental product development, Bobcat was launching the M-series. Real innovation, not just for the brand but for the compact equipment category. The job was to make the strength, precision, and power of a one-ton excavator legible at internet scale, without bringing the audience to a job site. Hard to overstate how hard that is. You can't really show torque on a banner ad. You have to make the audience feel it.
“You can't show torque on a banner ad. You make the audience feel it.”
Project goals
Show the M-series outperforming the competition. Integrate social, mobile, interactive, print, and point of purchase for the first time in Bobcat's marketing history. Squeeze HTML5, jQuery, and Flash for both UX and performance gains. Build and maintain a distinctive sub-brand across multiple partner agencies. Run the whole thing from media buy through tens of thousands of placements over multiple years.
My role
Creative director at the video, interactive, and print agency of record. Defined the vision and held the line on it across every player. Designers, writers, developers, and video editors on the AOR team. Creatives at other partner agencies. Concept development, on-set direction, video post, UX, web dev lead, media buy planning, asset supervision. All inside the budget and inside the Bobcat brand. Every campaign at this scale is a project management problem dressed up as a creative one. The trick is making both work.
The process
The campaign got built from the raw machine-test footage outward. Cameras at low angles. Mud. Hydraulic fluid. The kind of textures you only get when the machine is actually working. We married that to a bare-bones graphic system. The reference was reality car mechanic show meets Robot Wars. A new sub-brand logo to anchor the strength position, a deployable kit across video, ads, store displays, landing pages, and a tight identity guide that every partner-agency creative had to work from. That guide was the one thing that kept the campaign on-brand across years and partners.
Reality car mechanic show meets Robot Wars. The reference doc fit on one Post-It.
Results
M-series became Bobcat's most popular product line. 3,300+ media pickups. 1M+ video views. $2M reinvestment to extend the campaign into year two. Six years of campaign longevity, which in advertising is measured in geological time. The work that holds up is the work the brand can keep wearing.
