The Horn

The Horn video is a personal creative first after making the decision to transform into an in-house marketing department for video and content creation. The vision was to highlight an element of trucking that everyone could make a connection with and most importantly, strike an emotional chord. Another element was to start grounding our ‘Born Ready’ tagline.

So thinking back through my own life prior to joining Mack and becoming involved in the trucking industry, my only interaction was as a kid fist-pumping truckers from the car to blow their airhorn as they passed by.

I pitched the idea of centering the video around the horn to Mark and from there we began collaborating on where we could take this. We began to brainstorm and soon the storyboard started to take shape. The emotional thread would be the circle of life. The young kid you see in the back of the old family station wagon would discover his own affinity for trucking. The ending would be him as a grown man driving his own Mack and experiencing a life reflection as he passes a kid fist-pumping him to blow the airhorns with this look of simple childhood excitement.

The Horn Creative – Four Goals

Taking this direction with the creative would not be simple to pull off. To create the nostalgia we would need to reach out to Mack owners and collectors to get access to a few generations of Macks.

We would need to scout a few locations and explore permits to close off highways or secure police escorts for filming. Of course, we would need to spend some time talent scouting. We need the kid, the teenager, and the grown man to bear some resemblance.

While getting to be creative and see ideas come to life, the purpose of our creative is to always support core business objectives. There were four main business objectives for The Horn. The thread of it was to show how some people are born for the trucking industry. To start bringing our new Born Ready tag line to life.

  1. Americana and Nostalgia – We wanted to illustrate that Mack has been here for many generations. Born and built here in the United States since 1900.
  2. Highway Product – The Horn was to reiterate the generational success of Mack’s Highway truck line and spark awareness and interest as we knew the launch of a new highway sleeper was lurking behind the scenes.
  3. Driver Image – Truck drivers keep America moving and we always want to tip our hats and say thanks when the opportunity presents itself.
  4. Social Media – We wanted to give the drivers and people in the trucking industry a place to share their own ‘Born Ready’ childhood stories. We set up a Tumblr page for The Horn and had many great story submissions.

The sad part for me on this one was not being able to go out and help shoot. Mark covered this one alone with the support of our agency Vela who ran logistics, supported the talent scouting, and also provided extra camera and audio support.

Beyond that, the story, the creative, the video edit, the production, and all of the supporting campaign concepts were our creation. I would also mention that our agency OX did the creative for the landing page and helped with styling the Tumblr page for story submissions.

And without further ado… here is The Horn. Hope you enjoy!

The Horn

YouTube video

And how did we do? Well the video was incredibly well received. The day we released it was one of the funnest moments I have experienced by just watching all the comments come pouring in. We had many compliments from people across the trucking industry and drivers. We also hit our goal of raising awareness for Mack and grew our social media audience in preparing for the launch of our new highway truck a few years away.

Below is a pdf of the campaign concepts and embedded with some of the top comments and reactions.

The Horn Campaign

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