The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2023–2025
Scania casts its electric truck as a workplace's new hire — 'new energy' for fleets
Scania casts its electric truck as a firm's new hire in a workplace mini-series — turning 'new energy' into a joke fleets finally get.
Scania (TRATON)
What it had to solve
Scania's updated electric trucks for regional and urban transport faced pragmatic fleet operators who saw electrification as costly, complicated and 'for others, for the future'. The launch needed to make taking the first electric step feel normal — and relevant now, not someday.
How it works
When Scania launched its updated electric trucks for regional and urban transport, the hard part was not the truck — it was the buyer. Pragmatic western European fleet operators saw electrification as costly, complicated and 'for others, for the future', and a category full of futurist electric advertising had only deepened the shrug.
Åkestam Holst's first global campaign for Scania refused the genre. It built a mini-series inside an old-school logistics company and introduced the electric truck as the new hire: an office colleague whose benefits surface in everyday conversations, deadpan reactions and the small absurdities of workplace life. The campaign's name is the strategy in one line — 'New Energy' means the drivetrain's energy and the newcomer's fresh energy at the same time.
The mundane frame did what the futuristic one could not: openness to electrification rose 66%, interest in Scania's electric range 63%, and purchase intent 66%; 77% liked the films — 25 points above the campaign's own target — and the effect ran all the way down the funnel, with 50% visiting scania.com and 41% contacting the company directly. Effie Awards Europe confirmed the result with a 2025 Bronze in Multi-Market B2B.
Why it lands
- Placing the truck in an ordinary office makes the unfamiliar banal — the buyer's leap becomes 'hire a new colleague', the smallest professional decision there is.
- The 'new energy' pun carries the B2B claim inside the joke: drivetrain energy and newcomer energy are the same sentence, so remembering the ad remembers the reason.
- Entertainment out-performed the category's futurist clichés: 77% liked the films (25 points above target), and liking translated into +66% purchase intent.
- Skeptical buyers converted at the end of the funnel, not just in awareness: 50% visited scania.com and 41% made direct contact — the series behaved like demand generation, not brand theater.
What it did
Openness to electrification +66%; interest in Scania's electric range +63%; purchase intent +66%; 77% liked the campaign (25 points above target); 50% visited scania.com and 41% contacted the company directly; Bronze, Effie Awards Europe 2025 (Multi-Market B2B).
What you can take
People don't buy 'the future' — they buy a plausible Tuesday: put the intimidating new technology into an ordinary workplace scene buyers have already lived.
Since then
The campaign became Scania's first global platform from Åkestam Holst and anchored the launch of its updated electric regional and urban range: in the Effie Europe judging data every key image attribute improved, with +66% openness to electrification, +63% interest in the electric range and +66% purchase intent among western European fleet decision-makers, while 77% liked the films, 50% visited scania.com and 41% contacted the company directly. The 'new hire' device — introducing technology as a colleague — became the reference point for how Scania talks about electrification.
Sources
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