Cardata

The Future Of Driving For Work

The company car program falls apart in the parking lot.

Watch the full campaign · 1:33

The Strategy

Cardata pays people who drive for work. A company with a big team of field sales reps or service techs hands Cardata its whole vehicle program. Cardata designs it, tracks the miles and pays the drivers directly, with no receipts to file. The people who buy it run HR and finance, and they spend their days cleaning up whatever the old program left behind.

Cardata came to us to get its name known in a category where every company sounds the same. Our first scripts were built around one clunky mileage-tracking machine. Cardata liked the machine but caught a problem: it doesn't compete with mileage trackers, and a cheap app can fix that. What Cardata replaces is bigger. It replaces fleets of company cars, car allowances the IRS taxes, and the homemade ways companies track miles. So the campaign became three ads, one for each.

Every spot opens on Jake S., a sharp manager looking back on how things used to be. Then we cut to Jake before Cardata, with bags under his eyes, running a program that's falling apart in the company parking lot. In one, a driver gets a mileage rig that shrieks like a fax machine. In another, Jake works from a desk in the lot and asks a driver for his receipts. In the third, a company car is smoking, and the budget only covers the loaner.

The Process

One of the three scripts started out about the paperwork that buries the people running a vehicle program. Cardata's team worried it was a joke nobody would get. They also wanted the ads to get "tax-free" in, the one big benefit still missing. We pushed to keep the ads fun instead of turning them into a feature list. The answer was to trade the paperwork ad for a tax ad, built on the oldest tax headache there is: a pile of receipts.

Cardata wanted the ads to speak to companies, not to a driver hunting for a free mileage app. So the scripts say "vehicle reimbursement," not just "mileage."

We shot all three spots in one day, in the parking lot of an athletic facility in Denver. A full day outside means the sun keeps moving, and a shot from the morning can't cut next to one from the afternoon unless the light matches. Our lighting crew kept it steady from start to finish with 20-by-20-foot fabric frames to soften, bounce and block the sun.

Almost everything strange in the lot is real. The smoking company car is a fog machine piped through the engine bay. It's also our own car: we drove it from Rhode Island to Denver packed with gear from our storage there, so one trip moved the gear and gave us a picture car. The receipts come out of the glove box on a real blast of air, from the airbag rig we built for our Loxo alien spots. Getting the burst right took some clever rigging and several takes.

The loaner is a vintage Toyota pickup with a factory camper on the back. We found it for sale, and the owner was happy to rent it to us for a day. It was in rough shape, which was perfect for the ad, and rare enough that a few of us thought about buying it after the shoot. Rational thinking won out in the end and we all drove home in what we came in.

We wrote a few lines for the man living in the RV, so we'd have options in the edit. The line in the final spot isn't one of them. It was an improv called out on set between takes, and it won. We always want choices in the edit, and we'll roll on a funny line no matter who on set comes up with it.

Each ad ends on the after: Jake, put together again, thanking his phone, his laptop or the Cardata logo. Cardata named the tagline, "The future of driving for work." The narrator closes each spot on three short benefits, ending on the one that ad is about.

Cardata got three 30-second spots, a 15-second cut of each, three vertical reminder ads, and a library of photos from set for its landing pages and emails. Cardata ran the ads itself.

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