Laura Schluckebier

Launch: October 15, 2018
Role: Lead Project Manager
Agency: Team One

Working on the Lexus Plus campaigns was one of the most complicated and rewarding projects I've worked on.

Lexus Plus is a dealership initiative program which aims to improve the entire dealership experience for the customer. Lexus Plus dealers price each vehicle, part, and service at one price, to allow transparency in the buying process. Customers also work with a single point of contact. The goal is a superior customer service experience. Lexus Plus is a highly political program for our national Lexus clients. There are only about a dozen Lexus Plus dealers in the country. The National Lexus team needs to support these dealerships, which have taken a huge risk to change their business models, while at the same time not angering the majority of dealerships that operate by the traditional dealership model. Therefore, the campaign to support the Lexus Plus initiative needed to tread that same line.

Beyond the complexity of the subject matter, internal agency matters complicated the campaign further. I took over the campaign unexpectedly from the previous project manager with no handoff. I needed to hit the ground running to assess the status of the campaign and immediately triage the problem areas. To add to the situation, the entire account team swapped out within a few weeks of me picking up the campaign. Luckily, I work very well with new account teams.

The deliverables for the campaign were video, point of sale materials, radio, and digital banners. Our main challenge with these were the video deliverables. We created seven cuts. In order to tread that delicate Lexus Plus line, the videos were tagged at the end with the individual dealer tags, rather than the national Lexus tag. That means we had about 84 different versions to keep track of. Our national media plan inevitably had multiple specs to export to, and each of those 84 videos needed to be exported to those specs to run in the plan per region of Lexus Plus dealers. I lead the management of creating and trafficking these videos, with the help of my incredible account, ad ops, and production teams, and of course, Excel. You can watch several of our videos on one of the Lexus Plus dealer sites here.

The Lexus Plus campaign also reminded me of the importance of project managers as campaign continuity experts. Project managers should not simply be passing on information from one team to another; we should be synthesizing and extrapolating and drawing connections from one part of the campaign to others. At one point, a new creative team was assigned to create organic social posts for the campaign. While this team specialized in social media, they were unaware of the political trickiness of Lexus Plus. When reviewing the deck they had sent me prior to sending to clients, several phrases raised red flags to me as long being in line with the Lexus Plus language that we had clearly established in the campaign. My account lead and I laddered this up to the group creative director of the campaign, who agreed with our concerns and course corrected my social creative team. This simple connection so greatly impressed the GCD that he mentioned it to my supervisors as a sign of great leadership as a project manager.