When You Don’t Use ABAX…

The situation

ABAX is a Norwegian GPS tracking company that was entering the UK market with a strong product and almost no brand recognition. They needed leads, and they needed them fast, from a notoriously hard-to-reach audience: small construction firms and the builders who ran them.

The brief was a traditional B2B lead-gen play. Gated ebooks, LinkedIn campaigns, fleet manager whitepapers. A reasonable starting point, but worth pressure-testing before we built a campaign on top of it.

The real problem

The audience research told a different story. Builders weren't on LinkedIn looking for tracking software. They were on TikTok and Instagram, and they were jaded by anything that smelled like marketing. They'd have no qualms telling us where to stick our ebooks.

The real problem wasn't lead generation. It was attention. Without it, no lead gen tactic was going to work. ABAX needed to earn the right to sell to this audience before trying to sell to them.

The strategic shift

Stop talking like a B2B brand. Make the kind of content the audience already loved, and put the product truth inside it.

The platform I landed on was "When you don't use ABAX". Instead of explaining the benefits of tracking equipment, we dramatised the chaos of not tracking it. It gave the brand permission to be funny, to use real builders, and to lead with entertainment rather than education. It also reframed the brief from "how do we generate leads" to "how do we earn enough cultural attention that leads become inevitable."

What it became

The campaign ran in two layers. Short-form found-footage content showed the comedy of equipment going missing. Diggers in ponds, dogs in cement mixers, a JCB digger as goalkeeper during the World Cup. Then a hero film fronted by construction influencer Ryan Belcher pulled off a candid-camera prank, where a builder arrives on site to find his entire inventory "stolen", only for ABAX to locate it instantly via GPS.

No ebooks. No fleet managers. No jargon. Just builders watching content made for builders, on the platforms builders actually use.

Why it mattered

The strategy worked because it gave a serious B2B product license to behave in a way the category had never tried, and the industry noticed. The campaign won B2B Disruption Campaign of the Year at The Drum Awards, and Best Media Campaign at the Lovie Awards. ABAX's CMO, Sofia Toll, said it "really put ABAX on the map."

For a brand that started the year unknown in the UK, that was the result that mattered.