Picture this: 6,000 people live in Blythewood, South Carolina. Soon, 4,000 new jobs will arrive courtesy of a $2 billion Scout Motors factory. That’s not just economic development—that’s transformation. And Scout Motors and Venables Bell + Partners turned this moment into something unexpectedly moving.
The “Have a Great Day” campaign launching this week represents more than automotive advertising—it’s a love letter to the community that will build Scout’s future. Shot entirely in Blythewood without a single actor, the 60-second film captures real residents sending real workers off to what will become one of America’s most ambitious manufacturing projects. Coffee shop employees, gas station attendants, neighbors waving from front porches. Even South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster makes a cameo, because sometimes the best casting happens when you’re not casting at all.
When heritage meets homework
Paul Venables has been working with Scott Keogh for about 15 years, dating back to their award-winning Audi campaigns. When Scout came calling last year, Venables was Keogh’s first call. The brief was ambitious: resurrect an American icon while building a modern EV company from scratch.
Keogh describes the positioning as “Levi’s meets Apple”—authentic heritage with cutting-edge innovation. Venables says Scout’s strength comes from “combining its heritage with the spirit of its name. A scout explores and then comes back to the community.”
But this particular campaign needed to accomplish something more immediate and complex. Scout’s Terra truck and Traveler SUV won’t hit the market until 2027, according to industry reports. Until then, the brand exists primarily as promise and potential. The factory groundbreaking in 2024 gave them something concrete to work with—and a community genuinely excited to be part of the story.
The coffee shop strategy
Working with directing duo The Malloys and production company Alpen/Superprime, the team crafted something that feels more like documentary than advertising. No scripts, no rehearsals, just authentic moments of a community embracing change.
Beyond the main film, Scout and VB+P launched supporting initiatives that demonstrate genuine thoughtfulness. They placed newspaper ads thanking the hometowns of Scout’s earliest 30 employees scattered across the country. They handed out 4,000 free cups of coffee to workers across Columbia and Blythewood—one for every job the factory will eventually create.
These aren’t grand gestures designed for social media virality. They’re small acts of appreciation that acknowledge the human side of industrial transformation. When a $2 billion investment lands in a town of just 6,000 people, relationships matter more than reach and frequency.
Building brand by building community
The campaign launches the day after Labor Day with strategic precision—greeting Americans as they head back to work with a reminder that good work builds good communities. The :60 runs online and across social media, with cutdowns appearing on TV primarily during football season in priority markets.
Keogh believes the timing is perfect for Scout’s return: “There’s this moment in time right now in America”, between geopolitics, a little bit of tariffs, a little bit of protectionism, a little bit of ‘let’s do things again’ in America. I think it’s perfect for the brand and the product.”
The campaign positions Scout strategically in a crowded EV landscape. While competitors lean into dystopian futures or make impossible promises, Scout celebrates the present—the people actually building these vehicles, the community hosting this investment, the optimism that comes from creating something meaningful together.
Governor McMaster has been a vocal supporter of the company and attended Scout’s October 2024 vehicle reveal in Franklin, Tennessee. His cameo in the spot represents genuine endorsement from state leadership that helped bring the $2 billion investment to South Carolina.
What builds trust first
In a category dominated by hype and hyperbole, “Have a Great Day” accomplishes something refreshingly straightforward—it shows up for its people. Not the people who might buy Scout vehicles someday, but the people building them right now in a South Carolina town that’s about to see its workforce nearly double.
This approach echoes one of automotive marketing’s most successful campaigns. In the 1990s, Hal Riney built Saturn into GM’s most successful new model introduction by focusing on Spring Hill, Tennessee and its workers. His “Different Kind of Company” campaign featured real employees, celebrated the factory town, and even hosted customer “homecomings” where Saturn owners gathered in Spring Hill to celebrate their shared connection to the brand and place.
That’s sophisticated brand strategy disguised as community appreciation. Scout needs credibility before customers, authenticity before awareness. And credibility, it turns out, starts with treating your factory town like home instead of just a manufacturing location. Saturn proved this strategy could work—until GM eventually moved production elsewhere and the brand lost its community connection (but that’s a different story).
The campaign supports this with tangible community investment—the factory represents South Carolina’s largest-ever economic development project in Richland County, with production capacity for more than 200,000 vehicles annually at full capacity.
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