Portacool: Strategy, Media, Creative and Go to Market

Problem: Portacool is the largest manufacturer of evaporative coolers in the US, an amazing success story 30 years in the making. But they had an awareness problem, largely stemming from the fact they weren’t sure for themselves of who they are.

Our Strategic Insight: More than ever, keeping cool is the great enabler for all of us in society to function, irrespective of who we are, or what we do.

Creative Solution: Portacool had been trying to appeal to everybody by compromising their vision instead of appealing to the people that share their vision - and by doing so had lost sight of what they stood for. We didn’t need to come up with a new positioning for them, we just needed to peel away the layers they had built up over the years and go back to who they really were.

Knowing that cooling allows people to come together and be the best version of themselves, we wanted to show Portacools in action in a variety of environments. But . . . there was one environment many people knew Portacools from but Portacool had forgotten the association.

Years ago, Portacool was known primarily for appearing on the sidelines of sporting events, and during training, to keep athletes cool. However, we created an opportunity to transcend the rational benefits and create an emotive connection between Portacools and athletes. We realized that the conduit for that connection is the coaches, the ones who often guide us through a lot more than our sporting journey. So we also created a campaign to celebrate great coaches and their impacts on our lives, while also showing that anyone can be a coach.

Our third creative prong was to poke fun at an inferior competitor - humor has to be used in these situations.

Media Solution: Our Storybuilding as always was phased using our 5 key rollout moments for maximum effect. We used IBM Watson to align real time weather forecasts with the frequency of our advertising in various regions, sequencing with 3rd party data to push messaging through Google Paid Adwords, Bing, YouTube, Broadcast TV, Programmatic Media, Connected TV, Out of Home and Instagram.

Results: In 2022 Portacool has acheived an all time revenue high.