Many American manufacturers have a quiet fatalism about the health of their industry. Chronic labor shortages, shrinking margins, and the high price of automation have persisted so long that they've stopped being challenges to solve and become just part of the operating environment. Rapid Robotics — with its Robotics as a Service model and deployment measured in weeks, not months — was built to change that.
Small and medium manufacturers needed reminding that their problems could be solved rather than merely endured, and that delay had a cost: missed revenue, missed opportunities, lost time. But that urgency ran up against 50 years of unrealized promises from the robotics industry, which had long claimed that affordable automation was just around the corner. That promise never arrived until RaaS made it real. Rapid's audience needed what it offered, but was understandably skeptical of a pitch that sounded a lot like ones they'd heard before.
Don’t Wait to Automate is the campaign I built to resolve the tension between manufacturers' urgent need for automation, their cynicism about robotics, and their acceptance of headwinds they'd come to see as inevitable. Over four months, on a lean budget, I deployed a mix of social content, paid advertising, and thought leadership to remind manufacturers their problems were solvable, educate them on RaaS, and build real urgency. The campaign culminated in Get Real About Automation, a livestreamed symposium featuring prominent voices from across the industry.
My first priority was to reach our audience via paid social (and retargeting, planned for a later phase) with a reminder that their problems were universal, but solvable. I wanted to create something eye-catching, energetic, and optimistic, and draw a line from a familiar problem directly to Rapid as the solution. I developed the concept for a series of data-driven videographics, based on data I pulled from Rapid’s State of Automation survey, the US Department of Labor, and other sources. Superside handled design and animation.
With awareness and momentum being built by our social media, press, and advertising efforts, my next step was education. RaaS was still unfamiliar to our audience, and that lack of familiarity had turned into the primary blocker for Sales. Helping our customers understand what RaaS was and why it made sense was critical.
Working within a limited budget also meant building assets that could serve more than one purpose. I wrote this brochure with that in mind. It builds a sense of urgency by demonstrating the real consequences of delay, and overcomes objections with detailed information on the benefits of the RaaS model. It was a versatile asset that served as lead magnet, sales enablement, and trade show handout.
Jaime Chong was the designer for this piece.
Get Real About Automation, the livestreamed event at the heart of this campaign, was built to prove Rapid's credibility through the voices of the industry's most respected names. I wanted the sizzle promoting it to make that same case in miniature, to get viewers excited to experience our point of view in more depth. Produced across shoots in Rapid's San Francisco and Novi, Michigan locations and brought from concept to execution in a week and a half with the video team at Visual Aid, the sizzle worked so well it became one of the pillar pieces of Rapid's ongoing brand marketing after the event.
Our daylong livestreamed symposium Get Real About Automation was the culmination of this campaign. I planned three sessions designed to wrap up the entire story of the campaign in a single, authoritative piece of thought leadership featuring some of the most prominent voices in manufacturing and automation. The first session named the real challenges facing American manufacturing; the second examined how the workforce itself was changing to meet them; and the third showed how new financing and technology were finally delivering the solutions the industry had been promised for decades. Together, they articulated Rapid's point of view — that automation actually accessible to small and medium manufacturers had finally arrived — more credibly than any traditional marketing could. The sessions became an ongoing source of social content and other assets for the brand long after the livestream ended.