4RUNNER WAS
FIFTH IN DENVER.
I picked up Keep It Wild in late 2015 and was driving the creative by the next flight. By 2018, 4Runner was #1 in Denver’s mid-size SUV segment, at 18.8%, ahead of Subaru and Jeep.
Subaru and Jeep owned that terrain story for years. We didn't fix it with a better tagline — we drove to the mountain and proved it there instead.
THREE FLIGHTS
TO GET THE KEYS.My first flight, I worked inside the approach I inherited. On the next one, I pitched a new direction and named it Parallel, and my ECD and I shaped the execution together. By Beaten Path, the call was mine: one mountain, one day, every format.
ONE MOUNTAIN.
TOO EXPENSIVE TO USE ONCE.Toyota booked this as a TV shoot. I pushed for mobile and social cuts that weren't in the brief, because one day on a mountain was too expensive to only use once.
FROZEN BOOTS, NOT COLD FEET.
Beaten Path was shot on Pikes Peak in winter. My boots froze to the ground more than once. The mountain doesn't ease up for a shoot schedule — between takes, the crew rotated through mountainside yurts just to keep feeling their hands. Someone handed me glacier glasses before we even started — full side shields, dark enough to look ridiculous off the mountain — because at that altitude the glare off the snow will mess with your eyes fast. This wasn't the shoot where I learned to plan for conditions like this. It's the one where that lesson paid off: real gear, a real system, and we still directed stunt drivers along freezing, snow-packed mountain passes and got everything on the list.
WE WRECKED THE BUMPER. WE GOT THE SHOT.
Real mud, on camera, takes a plan. We built a launch ramp, soaked it down, and brought in a professional stunt driver to run it the way closed-course stunt work runs — full control of the vehicle, one clean take after another until the footage matched what we needed. We shredded the front bumper doing it. We also flooded a trench with mud water so the 4Runner could drag itself out dripping like something that just crawled from a swamp — one of the best frames from the whole shoot.
The entire mountain unit crew was Colorado Film School — a production lead, an instructor, and his senior students, with me directing. A student crew moves fast. I brought a real shot list, a script, and a sign-off process so one day on a mountain didn't turn into guesswork.
THE OFFER, NOT THE PITCH.
By the time someone's watching a rich-media banner, they don't need another feature pitch — they need to know if there's a deal worth acting on. We geo-targeted the unit straight to the offer page, and I made the case for the CTA to be a static, always-visible button instead of buried inside the video, so someone who never pressed play still had one clear way to act.