I rode a national media wave...

If you lived in Colorado when Coach Prime first got to Boulder, you remember the chaos.

Actually, chaos is probably too soft of a word.

It was pandemonium.

Everywhere you looked, people were talking about Colorado football.

And whether you loved it, hated it, rolled your eyes at it, or bought all the way in (I was ALL in), one thing was obvious:

Attention had arrived. A lot of it. And when that happens, the smart question is not, “How do we create our own wave?”

The smarter question is: “How do we ride this one?” That was the opportunity sitting in front of us.

At the time, Wrapmate had recently acquired Wrapify.

If you do not know Wrapify, the short version is that it is an out-of-home advertising engine built around wrapped vehicles driving through cities during key windows to generate impressions and visibility.

So now, all of a sudden, we had an interesting capability. We could use wraps not just as a product we sell, but as a media channel. Because the second you understand that your product can also become the vehicle for attention, you start seeing different possibilities.

So I started joking around about wrapping my truck in a Coach Prime / Colorado Buffs design.

And then the joke got serious.

Because the more we looked at it, the more obvious it became that this might actually be a very smart way to capitalize on what was happening in the market.

Not by creating something out of thin air. But by taking a moment, the whole state was already obsessed with and finding a way to insert ourselves into it using what we already do well.

That’s the first lesson.

You do not always need to manufacture attention from scratch.

Sometimes the better move is to recognize that the attention is already there and ask how your brand can show up in a way that feels interesting, useful, or worth talking about.

So… that’s what we did.

We decided to wrap my truck, a big F-250, in a full Coach Prime / Buffs-themed design. Then we decided to take it a step further and activate 25 other cars using Wrapify’s infrastructure and technology.

Now it was no longer just a one-vehicle stunt. Rather, it was a movement. That is a very different thing.

And to make it happen, we had to move quickly.

Typically, from start to finish, whenever we wrap a vehicle, the process takes somewhere around 3 to 4 weeks. That is pushing pretty hard already.

So one of the first challenges was operational. How do we tighten the timeline enough to make the campaign relevant while the wave is still hot?

We got it down to about 2 weeks.

When you’re riding a wave, you don’t know when it’ll go down, so timing is always part of the creative.

If the deliverable is late, it doesn’t matter how clever the strategy was. The market has already moved on.

That’s one of the reasons so many companies miss opportunities like this. It’s not that they are bad at coming up with ideas. They’re just bad at moving quickly enough (legal, leadership buy-in, creative briefs) for the idea to still matter.

On the design side, I gave our lead designer a lot of freedom. Honestly, I did not give him much input at all. I wanted to see what would happen if I got out of the way and let him cook. That was intentional.

Because sometimes the best thing a leader can do is create the space for the right person to go do something bold. That’s a lesson too.

Not every good campaign comes from the founder or the executive forcing their fingerprints all over the work. Sometimes it comes from trusting the people closest to the craft.

While the design was being built and the vehicles were being prepared, I was doing something just as important in the background…

I was building the story. And this is where I think a lot of brands drop the ball. They assume the asset is the story. It usually isn’t.

The truck was not the story. The 25 wrapped cars were not the story. The Wrapify activation was not the story.

Those were ingredients.

The story was…

… a Colorado company rides the Coach Prime wave with a wrapped truck, a 25-car activation, and a creative campaign designed to turn state-wide sports chaos into earned media and visibility.

That’s a story people can understand. That’s a story the media can retell. That’s a story people can bring up later.

So while the visual side was coming together, I started doing the homework.

I built out lists of media outlets.

I started pulling together names, sources, contact routes, and angles.

And as we started seeing progress on the vehicle getting wrapped, we began posting some of that content too. Not the whole thing. Just enough to start building curiosity.

You want to bring people into your story, and this was one way to do it.nA lot of teams wait until everything is done to tell the story.

But if you have something visually interesting or culturally relevant in motion, sometimes documenting the process becomes part of the campaign.

That gives the story more texture. More anticipation. More ways for the audience to enter.

At the same time, Wrapify also had its own operational timeline.

It takes time to get vehicles found, drivers coordinated, the whole activation lined up, and the campaign actually moving from plan to live execution.

So once again, you are not just dealing with creative. You are dealing with orchestration.

That is why I keep saying good campaigns are not about one tactic. They are about building enough pieces so that when the moment arrives, the machine can actually move.

Then we started getting traction.

I was fortunate to have a neighbor who worked for Fox21 down in Colorado Springs and had a strong relationship with one of the sports anchors there. That helped crack the door open.

She was intrigued by the story and came up to Denver where the vehicle was being wrapped. She captured footage live from the graphics shop while the installation was happening.

That was huge. Because now the story had movement. It had real footage. It had process. It had something beyond just a finished truck sitting in a parking lot.

Then Denver7 came in.

They had a local-business feature segment that this fit really well, and they ended up doing a piece on us too. I did an interview, they captured a bunch of footage, and we supplied assets from work we had done before so they could tell the broader story more cleanly.

That’s another lesson people miss. If you want earned media, make it easier for the media to tell the story.

Don’t make them go digging through your company trying to figure out what’s important.

The original goal, by the way, was not Fox21 or Denver7.

The original goal was to get a tweet, post, or share from Coach Prime or one of his family members.

That was the dream.

Because they are all heavy on social media, and if one of them picked it up, the thing could really move.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

And this is where I think a lot of people would misread the campaign. They would say, well, then it did not work.

Ahh… wrong.

That was the initial target. It was not the only way to win. And that’s a very important distinction.

One of the hardest things in marketing is understanding when the market gives you a better outcome than the one you originally planned for.

We didn’t get the share, but we did get the story. And in many ways, the story was more valuable.

Fox21 and Denver7 gave us earned media.

That’s not small. That’s not fluff. That’s the kind of thing that changes how the market perceives your company.

And this is where I think a lot of brands make a mistake. They look at campaigns like this only through a direct response or lead generation lens.

How many leads? How many deals? How much revenue? What was the direct ROI?

Yea… those questions are important, but for a different campaign with that exact goal.

But that’s when you need to clearly distinguish the goals of campaigns.

Sometimes the more valuable return is indirect.

That is the kind of return people undercount. And it is often where brand campaigns really pay off.

This campaign was not cheap. It was multi-five figures. So yes, you have to be honest about that. This wasn’t some scrappy little $600 side project that accidentally turned into a sensation.

But the ROI can be looked at through multiple lenses.

These things all compound off of each other.

And it matters even more when you realize how people actually used the campaign as a reference point afterward.

That is what I mean when I say the campaign became a credibility engine.

Not just a visibility play. That’s the real shift.

At the beginning, you think you are building something to get noticed. Then if it works, you realize you built something that makes future trust easier.

I believe that’s a much bigger win.

And there is another piece here that I think is worth saying plainly: Not every worthwhile campaign is built for immediate direct-response conversion.

Those campaigns can still produce revenue. And they often do.

But if you only judge them by whether a dotted line can be drawn from truck wrap to sale in a neat little spreadsheet, you’ll miss what they actually did.

This campaign helped us create the kind of visibility that makes everything else work a little bit better.

That was the point.

So if I were turning this into a framework for B2B teams, it would look like this:

Do not force your own event if the market is already obsessed with something bigger.

How can your actual product, service, or capability naturally attach to that moment?

Do not wait until the thing is finished to start thinking about media, messaging, or rollout.

If local media, partners, influencers, or customers wanted to explain what you are doing, would they know how?

That does not mean the campaign failed. Sometimes the market hands you a different path to value.

One good campaign can keep showing up long after the last wrapped car has left the street.

That is exactly what happened here. We tried to get Coach Prime’s attention. What we got was better. We got earned media. We got a story. We got search visibility. We got more proof that Wrapmate could play bigger than people expected. And that is a lesson worth remembering.

If your company is always trying to create attention from scratch, you are making the job harder than it needs to be.

Sometimes the smartest move is to look around, recognize where the wave already is, and figure out how to ride it in a way only your company can.

If you want help with this, just reply to this email, and let’s schedule some time to chat.

See you next week.

Javy

P.S. — Is there a topic or strategy that you’d like me to unpack? Drop me a line. Let me know what you’re thinking of. And, I’ll get it queued up for an upcoming newsletter.