The year before Volvo was sold to Geely Automotive in 2010, it had suffered a pre-tax loss of $653 million. Its fifth year of losses. To help return the brand back to growth, Geely pledged a $900 million in investment on top of the $1.5 billion it had already paid for the company. This was Geely’s biggest ever international acquisition - and far from a safe bet.

Geely’s strategy to get a return on its substantial investment was to increase prices. But to do this, it needed a product and a brand that people would be willing to pay more for. Its first product was the re-designed XC90 SUV, which received rave reviews. Volvo now had a premium product, at a premium price. The only problem for the public was that it was made by…Volvo. Volvo now needed a premium brand to match its premium product.

We challenged the creatives to make Volvo famous as a brand that really cared about people, not safety. We wanted to find those who best exemplified the values Volvo shared with its audience. The work was going to run on Sky Atlantic, ‘the home of world-class cinematic storytelling’, so our creatives saw an opportunity for some powerful storytelling about people who moved the world forward.

The result was a series named ‘The Defiant Pioneers’. These were beautifully elevated, filmic docudramas filled with emotive stories of people who were trying to make the world a better place.

To bring them to life, our campaign built a novel way to combine 5” idents and 30” trailer spots on Sky Atlantic, directing people to our full films hosted on Sky’s On-demand platform. Where other car brands created ads, we’d be seen to create world-class docudramas about people who moved the world forward.