Situation

Covid forced Caterpillar to cancel their hugely popular annual, in-person event Quarry Days, seriously denting their ability to court clients and generate leads. A keystone event in the global quarrying calendar, the cancellation left a huge silence that their competitors would be quick to fill.

Brief

Cat needed something as unique, informative and entertaining as their lost event. It had to live online, engage quarriers everywhere, improve brand perception and, most importantly of all, generate new business leads for Cat.

The initial brief was for a webcast, but we convinced the client we had to do something completely different – to show a side of quarries this audience had never seen, despite spending most days working inside one.

Objectives

- Generate new business leads for Cat (eMail signups)

- Maximise customer engagement (discussion, comments, queries)

- Improve brand perception via the creativity, quality and value of our new content

To show quarries (which our target audience see every day) differently, we asked the question, ‘What might happen in quarries once everyone has gone?’ We took inspiration from Toy Story and nature documentaries, and created a series of films that showed the machines coming alive at night. To ensure our films stood out, we took every aspect of the typical construction film and flipped it. Instead of listing the machine’s technical capabilities, we portrayed them as living animals. Instead of bright lights and rock music we used darkness and silence. Most of all, instead of trying to sell our customer’s quarrying machines, we told stories that reframed the entire quarrying process, from soil to sell.

Data gathering

Our team spent hours on calls with quarrying experts, learning all we could about the machines, stages, processes and pain points. We soon realised that every quarrying operation is different and every expert has a different focus: logistics, materials, investment, people, expertise, sustainability. This taught us that we needed to tell the quarrying equivalent of a meta-myth: the story of the archetypal quarry.

Target audience

Business owners primarily, plus machine operators. The former buy the machines, the latter influence purchase. Our average customer, we discovered, was a man aged 40+, who’d spent most of his life in and around quarries.

Approach

Considering the above insights, our audience and our goal (new business leads) we set our sights on creating an entertaining, informative, long-form piece that would show our audience how deeply Cat understands quarrying, by showing them a side of quarries that even they had never seen before.

Implementation

Each episode was teased for a week or so before release with its own 30s trailer. The full film was then released on Cat-owned platforms for key clients, then, a few days later, publicly on Cat’s YouTube channel.

Timeline

We won the business in March 2021, and the final episode dropped almost exactly one year later. Positive feedback from internal experts and external audiences allowed us to keep an extended timeline, long enough to make six separate episodes with the highest possible production quality.

Placement

Films were initially available only on Cat-owned platforms, then on Cat’s YouTube channel, and finally through Cat’s global network of dealers, via Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin.

Scale

Our films needed to have global appeal, so Cat helped local affiliates adapt it for their market. As a result, the series was a smash hit in dozens of countries, including France, Germany, the UK, and China.

Sales

Direct sales are almost impossible to calculate for Caterpillar, as all sales are conducted through independent dealerships.

Engagement

Feedback was hugely positive, with customers proactively asking about Cat’s quarrying offering, and remarking how nice it was to ‘See something different’ in the quarrying space.

Reach

Seen by over 2.5M customers in the first year alone.

Achievement against business targets

New business leads

The event we replaced attracts ~400 guests and generate ~50 new business leads per year. Our films hit >2.5 million views and generated >1000 new business leads in a matter of months.

Maximise customer engagement

Customers proactively contacted Cat to ask about Cat’s quarrying offering

Improve brand perception

By creating a series that clearly aimed to inform and entertain rather than sell, we also showed a side of Caterpillar our audience had rarely seen before – which our customers appreciated.