Grip
Video series · AI-produced · For a European tyre group
An old man in a local pub is in the middle of a rant. He’s a farmer, tired and a little bitter, and he’s arguing with an old friend about some new piece of legislation. “I don’t care about that,” he keeps saying. What he cares about is how hard it has always been. He’s not a big operation. He drives his own tractor: five tractors in forty years, “sixty tyres, if you want to count.” Somewhere around the tyres, a smile gets out. His hands stay wrapped around his glass the whole time.
A teenager sits in a messy bedroom, staring at his laptop. Suddenly he shouts “They are heeereeee!” and he’s gone: down the stairs, out the door, all the way to the next street, just as a pack of Tour de France riders flashes past. The last shot is his face, lit up, saying quietly to himself, “They are so good.”
A young couple pushes a stroller down a cobbled street, happy and very tired, trying to finish a conversation. Every time the stroller hits an uneven stone they stop mid-sentence, and the camera drops to a wheel balanced on the edge of a cobble, holding. The baby never wakes up. The parents are only just keeping their grip, and the tyres are doing fine.
These are three films in a series for a European tyre group. Each one follows a different person, at a different age, somewhere in Europe, doing one thing that matters in their life. Tyres only come up in passing: in the middle of a farmer’s rant, in a close-up of a stroller wheel, [the teenager’s tyre moment]. Nobody sells anything.
The angle: grip
The whole series hangs on one word. Grip is what a tyre does, and it’s also how people hold on to what matters to them. The farmer has held on to a hard, independent life for forty years, and the tyres are the one part of it he talks about with a smile. The teenager is gripped by the race, and the riders he’s waiting for are trusting a strip of rubber a few centimetres wide. The couple are only just keeping a grip on a new life, while the stroller wheels quietly do it for them.
The tyre isn’t the hero of any of these films. It’s the thing underneath, which is exactly where tyres live in real life.
Why feeling has to come before facts
Tyres are a category people avoid thinking about. As one tyre engineer put it, “You only know that you need the tyres when you get in a severe situation.” The usual answer is to manufacture that severe situation: the wet road, the child stepping out, the near miss. Fear works for a moment, but it attaches the brand to the worst thing that could happen to you.
The research on how people decide points somewhere else. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients whose brain injuries had cut them off from their emotions while leaving their intelligence intact. They scored normally on reasoning tests and still couldn’t make good decisions in their lives; some kept choosing badly even after being told plainly which choice was bad. Knowing wasn’t enough. Without a feeling attached, the facts didn’t move them.
Paul Slovic’s work on the “affect heuristic” shows the same thing from the other side. People attach a quick good or bad feeling to things, and then judge both risk and benefit from that one feeling. If something feels good, it seems safer and more useful at the same time. For a tyre brand, that matters a great deal: the feeling a person has about the brand will quietly colour how safe they believe its tyres are.
Stories are how that feeling gets built. Research on what psychologists call narrative transportation, starting with Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, found that people who get absorbed in a story argue with it less and come away holding beliefs that match it. And on the business side, Les Binet and Peter Field’s analysis of nearly a thousand campaigns in the UK’s IPA effectiveness databank found that emotional campaigns produce bigger and longer-lasting business effects than rational ones, while rational messages mostly win in the short term.
So the films do the first job. They give the brand a place next to things people care about: an argument with an old friend, a hero going by, a family’s slow walk home. The facts do the second job, and they land differently once the feeling is there. In an emergency stop from 80 km/h on a wet road, the best-rated tyres can stop up to 18 metres shorter than the worst. Four contact patches, each roughly the size of your palm, are all that hold a car to the road. On their own those are numbers. After the films, they’re about the people you just met.
Making it with AI
The series is AI-produced, which made range affordable, without a casting call or a location budget for each. The difficult part was the opposite of spectacle. These films live on small, ordinary performance: a tired face mid-argument, a teenager’s voice cracking with excitement, a stroller wheel balancing on the edge of a stone. The tyre accents had to stay small enough that you could miss them the first time.
Sources: Damasio’s patients and decision-making · Slovic et al., the affect heuristic · Green and Brock, narrative transportation · Binet and Field, The Long and the Short of It · EU tyre label, wet braking · contact patch · tyre engineer quote