Working within the strict confines of budget and business need is a notorious challenge. In 2019 I was tasked with the largest brand centric strategy Vestas had ever done. Primarily positioned as a manufacturing company, the brand recognition of Vestas in Denmark was strong, however outside our borders it was significantly more limited. Getting buy-in from the wider business to position only the brand without the intention of selling any product was, well, difficult. And of course the familiar vicious circle often follows - how do you get buy-in without content, but how do you create the content to get the buy-in and therefore secure the budget?
After months of conversations around how to position the campaign and where to source existing content to build from, the Powered By concept was born. Working as a bridge between the brand pillars - experience, performance, innovation, purpose - and the new Formula E partnership, Powered By became a way to celebrate where Vestas has been and look forward to where they planned to go. The global campaign had a budget of a whopping 10,000 DKK. Nope, there isn't a missing zero - 10k was what I had to work with to prove the concept and create what I needed to sell it to the business and hopefully get more funding. I built a basic webpage within the existing web architecture, found b-roll from the cutting room floor and clips from existing films, and wrote all the blog posts myself so we could share the stories that were essential to the project, stories that had been forgotten and never celebrated.
And then COVID-19 hit. With only a one year contract and a pandemic-related hiring freeze I was unfortunately unable to stay long enough with the brand to see the concept reach its full potential. But as simplistic as the results are I'm still proud of them. A microscopic budget and a wealth of stories to tell doesn't spell success, but it was as start and hopefully as things return to normal the baton can be passed and a new vision infused.
Brand Strategist • Campaign Manager • Creative Director • Copywriter
In addition to managing the campaign and creative I also worked as the lead copywriter. For this project I ghost wrote a series of blog posts for senior management about sustainability projects in the local regions and produced all short-form social media text as well. Below are writing samples from those blog posts.
