A driver gets a license, buys a car, falls in love, raises a family. Eventually, there is room for a reward. In Mazda’s 2015 commercial A Driver’s Life, the life supplies the plot. The vehicles move through it. An agency with the rather literal name Garage Team Mazda had arrived at an interesting question: how much can you tell someone about a car before you need to tell them something about themselves?
Two years earlier, the agency had helped Mazda explain its engineering through a campaign called Game Changers. By 2015, Mazda said that work had increased awareness of its vehicles’ functional attributes. The next assignment was emotional connection. For anyone who has tried to sell a complicated product, this is a familiar predicament. The explanation can land perfectly and still leave the customer sitting comfortably in the car they already own.
A company built around an account
The Garage began with a purchasing decision. In October 2010, Mazda announced WPP as its full-service marketing communications partner following an agency review. The new Team Mazda would support the United States, Canada and Mexico. WPP assembled the operation from its network, locating its headquarters near Mazda’s own offices in Irvine, California.
That arrangement gave the agency an unusual starting condition. Many agencies begin with a few people and then hunt for clients. This one had the client in its name. Contemporary reporting identified David Latta as managing director and Harvey Marco as chief creative officer. Doner, the agency associated with Mazda’s familiar Zoom-Zoom slogan, was the predecessor.
Reported annual Mazda account value.
Account value is different from agency revenue.
The Orange County Business Journal described an annual account worth $150 million and an operation taking shape with about 100 staff. Those numbers belong together: this was an organizational commitment to a substantial assignment. Media expenditure, production and agency compensation are different parts of an advertising budget. Reading the account figure as the agency’s income would turn a useful number into a misleading one.
What Mazda bought was coordination. Strategy, creative work and the choice of where advertising appeared could be organized around the same commercial problem. The original Canadian structure makes the arrangement tangible: JWT handled creative, customer relationship marketing, digital and collateral work, while Excelerator Media handled national media planning, buying and research.
The workshop had a sticker sheet
The Garage adopted the vocabulary of a place where people make things. Its identity designers described a workplace shaped around automotive enthusiasm, right down to environmental graphics and stationery. Business cards and letterhead came with stickers that let employees personalize the system. Agency yearbooks collected work, detours and ideas that never quite made it into the world.
There is something pleasingly specific about that sticker sheet. A dedicated agency asks people to spend a great deal of their working lives thinking about one brand. Here was a small provision for being an individual within it. It is a detail about the designed culture, rather than a claim that every employee experienced the same workplace.
The commercial work extended far beyond a clever line on a television screen. The agency’s documented services included retail marketing, public relations, social and digital work, motorsports, data and analytics. Its expertise sat at the junction of automotive knowledge and advertising execution: translating a vehicle’s attributes into a national story, then into communications that could help a dealer sell it.
First, explain the machine
The 2013 Game Changers campaign borrowed its logic from people who challenged accepted ways of doing things. High jumper Dick Fosbury offered an especially legible analogy: change the method and you can change the result. Mazda used that frame to talk about its own engineering choices, including Skyactiv technology.
The distribution was deliberately conspicuous. Coverage described placements around major television events, outdoor advertising on Sunset Boulevard and in Times Square, and sports-broadcast integration. An engineering argument was being given the staging of a cultural event. Mazda’s launch announcement also described cinema, print, digital and motion-sensitive billboards.
The trouble with a good analogy is that it can finish its job before the advertiser has finished theirs. A viewer might accept that Mazda engineers think differently without feeling any urgent reason to visit a showroom. That distinction became explicit in the next campaign’s rationale.
“We need more people to have an opinion.”
Russell Wager, Mazda marketing executive, 2015
Then, find the driver
Wager’s remark captures the problem more cleanly than a dashboard full of campaign metrics. Awareness and preference ask different things of a person. One asks whether a name or an attribute is available in memory. The other asks whether it matters when a decision arrives.
Driving Matters launched in May 2015 with television and cinema versions of A Driver’s Life, supported by digital and social activity. Its life-stage structure gave the product a role in something the audience could already recognize. Mazda kept driving enjoyment at the center, but widened the invitation beyond a discussion of engineering.
Engineering choices
A driver’s life
Exploration and food
The practical lesson is diagnostic. Before rewriting an advertisement, decide what is missing. If buyers misunderstand the product, explanation can help. If they understand it and remain indifferent, repeating the explanation more loudly may do little. The Garage’s campaign history gives that distinction a concrete shape.
Eventually, let the audience go foraging
By 2022, a Mazda content partnership could begin with a chef. Tasting Wild paired Melissa King with National Geographic explorers and experts in a five-part series. The CX-50 supplied transportation for journeys into landscapes that supplied ingredients and inspiration. An episode in Hawaii brought King together with geothermal scientist Andrés Ruzo.
In the Olympic National Forest episode, King explored with Korena Mafune and cooked a mushroom congee. The product belonged to the journey while the food provided another reason to watch. ThinkLA named Garage Team Mazda’s Tasting Wild: Mazda X Nat Geo Creativeworks its 2023 Best Branded Content winner.
The machinery behind that kind of communication matters, too. Nativo named The Garage its Agency Partner of 2020, describing collaboration among strategy, account, analytics and media teams on Mazda content initiatives. Distribution and measurement were part of the assignment. An attractive film still needs to reach the people whose attention the brand is trying to earn.
The name did not contain every idea
The tidy description of The Garage as a single-client agency has an entertaining exception. It also worked for the Newport Beach Film Festival. In 2018, Quota sent viewers into a science-fiction predicament involving astronauts, a valuable discovery and an unresolved conflict. The trailer used the audience’s desire for an ending to promote the festival.
A subsequent festival film, directed by REVERSE’s Johan Stahl, explored the disruptive imagination of a child caught between divorcing parents. These credits make a useful correction to the name on the door. An agency can be organized around automotive expertise and still possess filmmaking instincts that travel.
Copy the diagnosis before the campaign
The Garage offers a model for marketers who need several disciplines to share a deep understanding of one business. A dedicated team can carry context from the brand brief into media, content and retail work. The corresponding trade-off is concentration: the team’s purpose is closely tied to one client’s priorities. That is an organizational inference, not evidence of why any particular restructuring happened.
The model also assumes enough sustained work to support the team. A business with a sporadic campaign calendar may be better served by a smaller internal group and outside specialists. Emotional storytelling needs product credibility; entertainment needs an audience interested in the experience. Neither an agency award nor a moving film, by itself, establishes incremental sales.
What a reader can borrow is smaller than an agency and cheaper than a national media plan. Write down what the buyer already understands. Then write down what would make that knowledge personally consequential. The distance between those two answers is where The Garage’s most interesting work took place.