The main goal of the campaign was to engage adventure seekers and inspire them to push boundaries and seek new experiences. We were tasked with showing our audience that regardless of their age and how they like to adventure, the Toyota is the ultimate vehicle, a “co-conspirator” with legendary toughness. We achieved this goal by creating a suite of custom content: 3 digital videos, 9+ articles, a custom microsite, 38 original social posts, and a custom TV series.
Across the board, the content and campaign overdelivered massively, exceeded many of our engagement benchmarks, and delivered an impressive overall brand lift.
The ask was clear: The Tacoma had become outdated, the competition tougher, and Toyota needed to nail the relaunch—and reestablish the Tacoma as the most unbreakable, powerful, and fun truck. The wrinkle: create content that will resonate with each of their sub-audiences. The result: a multi-faceted, always-on Ready for Adventure campaign with three main parts.
To appeal to the under 40 and super spontaneous crowd, we created “Return to Sender,” anchored by a social-first program with a loose, up-for-anything vibe. To appeal to a slightly older demo, many of whom have fond memories of Tacoma-fueled adventures, we produced “For the Love of the Taco,” which leaned into the vehicle’s heritage, highlighting longtime Toyota Tacoma owners and the lasting impacts they had on their local communities. Lastly, to appeal to adventurers of every stripe, Toyota was the presenting sponsor of “Ultimate Mountain Athlete,”a brand-new original docuseries that premiered on Outside TV this summer.
Executing every aspect of the campaign was challenging, from sourcing authentic talent for the social “Return to Sender” content to finding Tacoma owners with incredible stories to tell for the “Love of the Taco” videos. Producing Ultimate Mountain Athlete was the heaviest lift. To debut the show within Toyota's campaign flight, we essentially created a 5-episode reality competition show from scratch in 3 months. We had to source competitors, judges, and safety crews. We had to establish judging criteria and find a location where we could shoot mountain biking, skiing, and rock climbing in one general area. And then, on an extremely tight budget and timeline, we had 7 days of shooting to capture all the competition and drama. From battling spring weather in the Rockies to sourcing all the material to flesh out each competitor's backstory, the entire project was a sprint of epic proportions.
In total, the Toyota Tacoma FY24-FY25 campaign delivered over 51MM total impressions, overdelivering by 32% across all tactics. All together, these activations drove 78,602 total clicks directly to client pages or back to branded content.
Outside conducted a Brand Metrics lift study for Toyota Tacoma for all site campaign impressions. The study measured 4 KPIs: awareness, consideration, preference and intent. The overall lift for the campaign was +6.4%.
Specifics:
Overall Impressions: +40% Overdelivery
Collective Social Insights: Across 38 contracted social posts, 6 creator posts and numerous added value posts across brands, platforms and placements, social awareness was at an all-time high for the 2024 Toyota program - ultimately overdelivering by +22%.
Video Views: +57% Overdelivery
Video Content Overview: Two additional pages housed video content for this campaign and were top tier executions. The PinkBike video landing page earned the highest engaged time on page(6:25) compared against the other content and brand benchmark(1:18). OutsideTV earned the second highest engaged time on page(2:53).
Custom Content: +15% Overdelivery. For custom content, the Outside Watch and PinkBike pages both earned an incredibly high engaged time on page(2:08) compared to network benchmarks(0:39).
