Behind the scenes of the Use Your Outside Voice campaign

At the end of 2021, it became pretty clear that if we wanted to level up our brand marketing strategy, we needed to invest more. Up to that point, RVshare had made some investments in advertising but very much with a focus on direct results (which is a great strategy for early-stage startups). The result is our Use Your Outside Voice campaign, launched in early June. But obviously, this work wasn’t created in a day, so let me provide you with a behind-the-scenes tour.

Getting started

In 2021, we worked for months on a brand architecture project, shoutout to the team of CMO Consulting Group that helped with this. As part of that, it became clear that we needed to focus on a few key elements to improve our brand strategy. Besides the classic work on key segments and use cases, we discovered that our identity wasn’t up to par and that we likely needed to build more awareness for the overall RV rental category. With this in hand, we set off to do two critical things. First, establish a better creative strategy with a new creative agency, and second, advance our media strategy.

Creative Strategy

Through an extensive RFP process, we found the right partner with Copacino Fujikado. They clearly understood what we wanted to communicate to potential RVers. Over a period of a few months, we developed our new brand identity as well as the outline of Use Your Outside Voice with them. Right off the bat, we felt that this campaign idea, out of the ones presented, resonated best with our long-term objective of building out the category and finding a way to communicate a brand concept with our audience. You can find more context in our Case Study.

Our objectives:

• Our new identity and campaign need to tie into each other to show visual consistency.
• Our campaign needs to be able to show multiple use cases and a diverse audience of RV travelers.
• It needs to be unique, owned content. Meaning the assets that we’ll create need to be able to show the ‘new’ RVshare identity instead of seeing them pop up across the internet from other companies.

Media Strategy

RVshare’s acquisition strategy has always been performance-focused. So while this was our first, more traditional brand marketing campaign, it was clear that we wanted to leverage that strategy as well for the campaign. Through research and with the help from our media agency and advisors, we settled on a plan that allows us to clearly measure the impact in certain (RV) markets. You’ll be surprised how similar the measurement of a brand is to performance if you truly dive into it. Through surveys, uplift measurement, and control/test markets you’re able to mimic a lot of the tools that are available through performance marketing. This will always be a fundamental piece of how we see Marketing at RVshare. I bet I’ll write more about this in the future as there is so much to share about this.

Use Your Outside Voice

What does a blood-moon ??, multiple kid actors (<12) being awesome, and making hotdogs have in common? Shoot day! Via our production agency, we found the perfect location for shooting our creative assets near Salt Lake City, Utah (in addition to being a perfect location for RVing).

While I don’t believe in luck, everything fell in place perfectly during our shoot day. Throughout a looong day, we were able to shoot both video & photography for dozens of use cases, leading to a good creative overload.

Behind the scenes, shooting one of our last shots of the day, try to spot it in the commercial.

The Result

The scenarios we shot during the day in Utah got distilled into the flagship 30-second ad for this campaign, which you can see above. In addition, we’ll have another few ads that we’ll rotate in during specific periods in the season.

Seeing the work being mentioned in AdAge (https://adage.com/creativity/work/reminder-remote-work-can-be-done-while-traveling/2422761) was one of the results that has been very rewarding. You should always aim to have world-class output and Use Your Outside Voice has certainly reached that level for us.

What’s next?

The goal is to do much more with the Use Your Outside Voice as it’s a concept that we can leverage much more as the idea in people’s minds will stay the same. We’re excited to bring more of this experience to life in the next year. With our tight Summer deadline as part of the process, we have many more ideas.

The work also isn’t done. Perfect creatives don’t exist, so we’ll approach this process as a test and learn and figure out what can be improved.

How have you used your outside voice?