Hagerty Insurance and MotorTrend were teaming up to create a cross-promotional campaign for their respective subscription services. Hagerty would help push their “Drivers Club” members to MotorTrend’s site for a reduced first year membership cost, and in turn, MotorTrend would produce a to-be-determined branded content series for Hagerty.

It was my team’s job to figure out what form exactly that series would take.

Our mission was to convert current Drivers Club members into MotorTrend subscribers while also bring attention to Hagerty with a show both audiences would enjoy. Therefore, Hagerty only had a handful of parameters for us:

1) The program must comfortably live on MotorTrend’s site alongside other MotorTrend Original Programs. 2) The show concept must reflect Hagerty’s deep love of automotive lifestyle. 3) The production must have a small footprint and fall within a budget of approximately $300k.

This was going to be fun.

Let me clarify one thing: while I appreciate the artistry and engineering that goes into building a car, what I value even more is a vehicle's ability to take me somewhere new. I had always wanted to create a show that celebrated this feeling for audiences like me — people who appreciated cars but didn’t know much about them.

So that’s what I pitched on our client call. The show would follow two friends on an epic roadtrip where they’d see the sights, get lost, and meet new people in new cities across the nation. Then together we came up with the Hagerty twist — we’d source the vehicles for each episode from Hagerty’s classic vehicle rental service, DriveShare.  The client loved it, and we got the green light.

Finding the host. We knew that we needed a great pair of hosts to ground our show. Then through a fun turn of events, friend of both Hagerty and MotorTrend, Justin Bell, was available. We shifted our show format to focus on one driver instead of two and named the series “Drives Unexpected”.

Given his history as a race car driver and television host, Justin joined on as a producer as well, working with the team behind the scenes to help choose vehicles, refine storylines, and co-write the VO. 

Assembling the crew. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our production team from Ryan Foss Productions would consist of four to five crew members and Justin. These included a director, DP, one to two additional camera ops, and a sound op.

The goal was to be nimble enough to efficiently and effectively capture a full episode’s worth of material in two days time while following all of the safety protocols set forth by the CDC and MotorTrend HR.

Outlining the narratives. After signing Justin, we shifted the narrative to focus on his adventures meeting the locals, trying the foods, going on epic drives, and visiting surprising automotive destinations.

This document summarized our initial high-level outlines for the six cities we planned to visit, including narrative through lines and overarching themes based on the location. Though the specifics were bound to change, we knew that this would act as our starting line for each episode.

Planning the production. Though I did not physically direct each episode due our production and post schedule, it was my job to develop and brief the production team on my vision for the show.

My process often consists of me writing down all of my thoughts and then refining for the team, so I broke the document down into sections such as Visual Style, Our Show, and Physical Production.

Creating the shot lists. The director and I worked together to create an exhaustive list of shots we could think of capturing.

Since the program was a documentary-style shoot with a small crew, we kept things flexible and gave shots a priority level of 1 or 2 so the team didn’t feel like they had to get every moment of every day.

Structuring the episodes. This page, taken from the production deck we presented to the client, outlines the main set ups for the first episode, including who Justin would meet and the talking points he’d hit.

It’s worth noting that we estimated the running time for each Act of each episode. Turns out we got too much great footage, so we expanded the show from a 12-15 minute format to a full 30 minutes.

Designing the title sequence. After working with the in-house design team to define the brand package of the show, we started to think about the title sequence.

We wanted something dynamic and quirky to match the style of Justin and of the program, and we looked to episodic references like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Jack Whitehall’s Travels with My Father, as well as to digital ads like those from Hendrick’s Gin. The result was an animated sequence that combined the architecture and cultural icons from our cities with Justin and the DriveShare vehicles he’d be traveling in.

The 6-episode series was a hit, appearing on not only MotorTrend and Hagerty's site as planned, but due to overwhelming positive feedback from the client and audiences, the distribution expanded to Amazon Prime and HBO Max.

The campaign garnered the following statistics:

• Positive completion rate on MotorTrend SVOD, starting with 64% for Episode 1 and ending at 80% for Episode 6

• 592,000 Total social impressions

• 1,662,000 Total program impressions