CONTEXT FOR CASE STUDY

Ram Truck Keep Plowing Campaign

Farms.com God Made a Farmer Pages

CLIENT OBJECTIVES:

1. Create awareness of the unique Ram Truck brand.
2. Create awareness to farmers, ranchers and rural community of the new award winning line of Ram Trucks.
3. Drive traffic to campaign landing page at an efficient cost per visit rate.
4. Drive immediate action, interaction and repeated interaction following the Super Bowl ad with an integrated digital media campaign.

 TARGETING:

• Farmers, ranchers and rural public across North America.
• Ram Trucks campaign to include website advertising, eblasts, enewsletter advertising, social media and outreach campaigns.

FARMS.COM BACKGROUND CAPABILITIES & RESOURCES:

Farms.com is an information and technology company that is focused on the agriculture and food  industry. Established in 1995, we were one of the founders of the agricultural internet community and continue to be one of its leading innovators. Our business has grown to over 100 staff who provide leading market offerings which include:

Farms.com – we operate a network of sites and communication platforms that provide news and information services for farmers and agribusiness users

AgCareers.com – the leading job board and HR offering for the global agriculture sector

CareersInFood.com – the #1 job board focused on the food and beverage processing sector

PigCHAMP.com – the leading series of software and information products for the global pork industry

Within these businesses we have cultivated large online communities of users and have developed a trusted communications position.

Our communications vehicles and platforms include:

• Websites – the Farms.com network of sites welcomes well over 600,000 visits, and over 3 million page views each month.
• Email – we send approximately 1.8 million emails per month to approximately 400,000 email recipients. These communications pieces are composed of a variety of topical newsletters distributed on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly or monthly basis. For example, we have 180,000+ recipients of our AgCareers.com weekly enewsletter, and in addition, we have 17,000+ recipients of a monthly enewsletter that is focused on new farm equipment product releases.
• YouTube – we have a large presence on YouTube through a number of different Farms.com channels.
• Twitter – we have various accounts geared towards our audiences’ interests, associated with our agriculture brands and niches. Total followers are in excess of 25,000 people.
• LinkedIn – we have over 6,000 members on our LinkedIn accounts, again by niche.
• Facebook – we have over 11,000 likes on our various Facebook accounts.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

In early January, Chrysler contacted Farms.com to assist them with the development of an agriculture campaign related to the Super Bowl. Chrylser’s plan was to use the Super Bowl TV advertisement “Farmer” to launch its “Year of the Farmer” campaign. “Farmer” was based upon the “God Made a Farmer” speech delivered by Paul Harvey at the National FFA convention in the 1970s.

As an agriculture leader in utilizing social media, Farms.com had used this same speech as the narration for our own YouTube video 18 months earlier, which had already generated 1.2 million views. The Paul Harvey speech and the Farms.com video were the inspiration for the Ram Truck campaign.

The Ram Truck commercial was to air during the 2013 Super Bowl, as the ‘kickoff’ to a year long positive campaign that highlights the importance of agriculture and the impressive contributions that farmers make to the economy and to society overall. As a component of the campaign, Ram Trucks was planning to make a donation of up to $1 million to the National FFA Organization (www.ffa.org - Formerly known as Future Farmers of America); based upon the level of engagement with the campaign and how many people watched the online video version of the commercial. From Farms.com’s perspective, AgCareers.com (a Farms.com company), has been a long-time supporter of the National FFA organization. Furthermore, since the agriculture industry is not frequently recognized through the mainstream media on such an international platform, Farms.com was very supportive of this Ram initiative.

Ram Trucks and its lead advertising agency the Richards Group, created all of the campaign elements; Farms.com provided messaging assistance to the campaign to keep an authentic “farm voice”.

CHALLENGES:

Between the initial point of contact and the airing of the Super Bowl ad, there was less than 30 days to prepare and execute a detailed multi-faceted digital campaign. It was imperative that existence of the Ram Truck Super Bowl ad not be leaked before the commercial was aired. As such, confidentiality was a key factor in preparing for this campaign. Thus, the Farms.com execution team was kept to a bare minimum of senior executives, and of course, everyone on the team had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Furthermore, it was decided that no campaign activities would begin until after the Super Bowl commercial aired.

Unexpectedly, the 2013 Super Bowl was impacted by a power outage – which further delayed the airing time of the Ram commercial until after 10:00 pm.

EXECUTION & DISTRIBUTION:

On Friday, February 1st, two days prior to Super Bowl, we expanded our project team to 15 people in order to be ready for execution on Sunday. The team members were introduced to the campaign objectives and the details of the particular role that they would play over the coming weekend. Farms.com proposed to Ram and was engaged to conduct the following digital media campaign elements:

• Complete an email campaign to our 400,000+ email contacts across ALL Farms.com brands; emails were sent immediately after the airing of the commercial on Sunday.
• Immediately upon airing, direct users of the Farms.com YouTube account to the Ram Trucks video.
• Immediately upon airing, add the Ram Truck video to the Farms.com homepage.
• Immediately upon airing, include a campaign article in the Industry News section of the Farms.com website to reach producers and producer organizations.
• Immediately upon airing, place Banner Ads on all of the Farms.com network of websites (ALL Brands) for a 2-week campaign.
• Immediately upon airing, launch a multi-faceted Social Media campaign to increase awareness for the following 2 weeks after launch – this included Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
• Include banner ads in all Farms.com newsletters for the following 2 weeks.

RESULTS: “GOD MADE A FARMER” SCORES A TOUCHDOWN!

“I receive letters every day from loyal customers of the competition thanking us for doing that spot and saying that they are considering the Ram,” Chrysler CMO Olivier Francois told Automotive News.

It took less than a week for the Ram Trucks Campaign to reach the 10 million view milestone, thus achieving the $1 million FFA donation. By February 14, the “God Made a Farmer” video had been viewed more than 12,404,036 times on Ram’s original YouTube post alone; other YouTube posts of the commercial have received more than 6 million views.

The “God Made a Farmer” video gained wide-spread appreciation with the public at large and within the agriculture community, to date the official Ram Truck video has received more than 15 million views, and other postings of the video have generated in excess of 10 million views. Some sites have crowned it the Best Super Bowl commercial of 2013.

Chrysler has indicated that the Super Bowl ad and “Farmer” campaign provided a tangible boost in Ram Truck sales. Through the first quarter of 2013, sales of Ram pickups were up 15 percent year-over-year in the U.S.; a 26-percent gain in March over 2012, and a 3-percent increase in February. While there are other factors that impacted Ram sales, Chrysler credits the Super Bowl ad and Farmer campaign as important factors.

The campaign’s success was driven largely through digital community outreach and social media. The video resonated with farmers across the country and scored a touchdown for the Ram Truck brand!

Farms.com is proud to have been able to deploy its Digital Media Skills and resources to support the Ram Truck Campaign which highlighted our proud agriculture sector.

Download a PDF Copy of the Farms.com Ram Truck Case Study.