With the launch of the Kia PV5, its new electric van for logistics and commercial use, Kia could have followed the category playbook for B2B advertising. Show success. Show scale. Show businesses that already made it.

Innocean chose not to. Entrepreneurship is not clean. It’s messy. Uncertain. Full of bad ideas, wrong turns, and moments that don’t make sense.

The untold truth is that every good idea is built on a pile of bad ones. So instead of celebrating success, the new campaign celebrates the process that leads to it. The campaign got inside the head of business owners with a business truth and showed its understanding of what it takes.

To do that, Innocean’s creative team created a series of very questionable businesses:

• Organic rocks
• Left-handed coffee mugs
• Reversible underwear
• Cleaning robots for cleaning robots
• Ladders for rock climbers
• Moonglasses
   

Shot in a raw, imperfect, almost accidental style, with details such as a coffee stain and bad lighting, the campaign captures the exact moment when business ideas are still forming. Ideas that raise doubts and concerns in anyone with a bit of critical thinking. But with a small fraction of brilliance that can be salvaged, if you look at them long enough.

“Kia has always believed in movement. Not just forward, but through uncertainty. The PV5 is built for people who are in that moment. Not when everything is clear, but when everything is still possible, said Benedict Abrahamsberg, general manager marketing communications at Kia.

“This is not a campaign about outcomes. It’s a campaign about courage. The courage to try. To fail. To keep going. That’s where glory lives,” added Gabriel Mattar, INNOCEAN CCO.

Print and DOOH ads broke in Germany in April and a social and digital print campaign will kick off in June across Europe, in Kia markets including the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, BeLux, Poland, Czech, Slovakia and Ireland.