Strategy

For the launch of the first-ever Lincoln MKC in the fall of 2014, we worked with various media partners to co-create content that would seamlessly bring the product and brand's symbolic values to new audiences. The launch theme for MKC was In The Moment, and we wanted to drive the idea of "living in the present" home, through content.

We worked with Vimeo to identify emerging filmmakers on the platform who were producing a look that naturally fit with the brand's tone - elegant, clean, human, and elevated. While this series involved product placement, this was not to become a series of car commercials. The vehicle was entered into each story as a supporting character, and in many cases we actually ended up cutting product content to be less heavy-handed. In developing each narrative, we asked a shortlist of filmmakers to interpret what it meant to live in the moment, and settled on three treatments.

The filmmakers put their shoots together and we then worked over the coming months to edit the footage into vignettes that made sense for the brand (and that almighty tome of legal restrictions that comes with showing automotive product), while allowing the filmmakers a breadth of freedom for expression. I learned a lot about directing independent content creators and collaborating on a thematic narrative on this one, and was so happy with the diversity of the outcome.

CONTENT + CREATIVE

Dig into each of the three films, and their associated content, below.

Publishing

By the time we'd arrived at three finished films edits, the work of our team was only half complete. We created a hybrid OLA banner for Vimeo sites that acted more like a silent movie trailer than an ad. We interviewed the filmmakers and produced long-form content about the creative process behind each story. Akin to building multi-media film trailers, we dissected each film into bite-sized content hooks that could be targeted to various groups of people (film lovers, travel fans, people talking about love on Valentine's Day, people having Fathers' Day conversations, etc) and seeded the "snackable" content out over diverse platforms including Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We used paid social to target these new audiences. In doing so, we built a social rapport between the brand and the film community, and optimized the creative again and again to showcase each story in the most effective way to honor the creative while extending the ROI of the media buy.

I love co-creation projects of this sort because we can promote emerging artists, and present product or a brand narrative in a way that's refreshing in an environment that's been saturated with the hard sell.