I have been a full time automotive marketer for just over ten years now. In that span of time, I've done some really cool stuff - like my part in helping to launch the Tesla Roadster - and a lot of stuff that frankly isn't all that glamorous or sexy (certainly not to people outside the industry).
One of the clients I have worked for the longest is K&N Engineering, in Riverside California. If you've seen their print ads, packaging, billboards, TV commercials or any number of consumer-facing ads or branding in the last ten years or so, there's a good chance you've seen my work. Generally speaking, all of it has been designed to sell product on the handful of selling points that make K&N filters unique in the market (unlike disposable filters, they never need to be replaced, they bring more air flow into the engine, and they are both a better long term value for consumers and better for the environment from a waste reduction standpoint). These bullet points have been presented in every conceivable medium from every possible angle in an effort to get consumers to re-think their next disposable filter purchase an make the switch to K&N.
Recently, my work supporting their advertising and marketing efforts came to close.
As a last hurrah, my marketing consultancy, BoostedGroup, was commissioned by K&N's CEO to put together a video telling a part of the K&N story that really hasn't ever been told - and it's actually an important one - that K&N makes it's products here in the U.S.
This has always been a significant point of pride for K&N, given that they compete in a market where more than 100 million disposable air filters are sold (and discarded) in the U.S. each year - and most (if not nearly all) of these are imported from overseas.
We didn't have much of a budget, so I called on my network of gear head collaborators and we came up with the concept of "show, don't tell" for this piece. K&N's CEO supplied the lines that he wanted to see included, but beyond that, we had carte blanche to tell the story in whatever we thought it could best be told.
Rather than use the usual "God Made A Farmer" shots of Normal Rockwell style Americana images paired with a Morgan Freeman-style voice over, we really wanted to go in another direction entirely with it. Something that we felt was true to the K&N story, but somehow transcended it. We wanted to give the facility its own voice and words.
After all was said and done and my marketing work for K&N came to a close, our piece was destined never to see the light of day beyond something for our respective portfolios. Still, what emerged surprised us all and we are all proud of the finished piece:
An extended "Director's Cut" can be found here
Shout outs to BoostedGroup collaborators Jared Holstein (Sport Compact Car, Top Gear), Calvin Wan (Formula Drift), Will Barber (from Toronto, eh) and Adam Stadler (K&N) as well as our friends Jarik and Pamela over at PIC.
Big factory, small film crew, no CGI, no Voice of God narration =