While brainstorming fresh social ideas, we stumbled on the fact that Ram Trucks had its own cologne. We knew men’s fragrance culture had exploded with the Gen Z audience on TikTok, so the discovery lit up the room. The Ram team had been looking for a way to connect the brand with this demographic but without the typical truck talk. We landed on a playful, unexpected angle: poke fun at high-end fragrance ads and make the kind of spot you’d never see from an automotive brand. Our main goal was visibility outside our core audience, and if we sold some cologne, that’d be great too.
We started by binge watching luxury cologne commercials to figure out the formula. Our first challenge was working around the reality that we had almost no budget—no money for A-list actors or fashion directors. We could get a half-day shoot with a truck and a bottle of cologne, some stock footage, and voiceover talent. That narrowed our options creatively.
And from those constraints came the idea: let’s tell a story with nature footage. Bald eagles, bears hunting salmon…rams. We put a couple of scripts together, turning classic cologne tropes into ridiculous Ram-style versions of themselves. Ultimately, we decided the way in was a love story between an alpha ram and an ewe. We secured the cologne and a truck, shot some product footage, and hunted down the perfect stock wildlife clips. Hundreds of male and female voice actors auditioned, and we sifted through them, mixing and matching until the perfect pair clicked.
We had a rough edit. But something was off. It didn’t resemble the high-end ads we were parodying. So we changed the music. Tried some fancy-looking filters. Swapped voiceover actors. Nothing worked. Then, a simple solve: what if it’s black and white? As soon as our editor got rid of the color, we all knew that did the trick. We shared the video with the wider team for fresh eyes. It passed the laugh test all around. We’d landed on the perfect over-the-top fragrance spot for truck bros.
This wasn’t a safe bet, and getting clients to buy in (with minimal notes) was an achievement on its own. The script pushed boundaries you don’t usually see, even from a macho truck brand. Credit to the Ram clients for their trust in the creative and willingness to take a big swing.
The primary goal was visibility on TikTok. To date, the 30-second spot has over 665K impressions, far and away the highest-performing TikTok the Ram Brand has ever made—nearly 4,000% above benchmark performance. That figure alone satisfied our objectives, and contributed to a running total of 1.6M views across platforms.
The spot achieved over 100K engagements and shares across platforms. And it moved product. The cologne sold out overnight, and sold out again. Daily sales are up 27x since posting.
We earned media too, capturing not only headlines, but influencer attention on TikTok, which helped connect with the younger demographic we set out to reach.
