“Skip the rental counter”
TVC & OOH
2026 Gold Winner
Craft directing
Out of home: The brief
We wanted to see if saturating an entire market with out-of-home ads would measurably improve brand awareness, recall, and ultimately, adoption.
The brief was to create an eye-catching, easy-to-understand campaign that could flex up and down depending on ad unit, size, context, dwell time, and more. We also wanted to leverage creative testing to ensure whatever creative we went into market with was battle-tested before blanketing the city.
Out of home: The solution
With Philadelphia as the chosen market, we concepted five creative directions, tested them, and, after developing a robust suite of executions to suit each ad unit, launched an out-of-home (OOH) blitz campaign, blanketing the city and airport with Turo ads. We leveraged a creative testing tool, Zappi, to glean insights and inform our creative decisionmaking, and only advertised in a single market to track the impact of brand advertising on gross booking value (GBV) in a match-market test, making this campaign our most data-driven and performance-oriented brand campaign ever.
After a successful run in Philly, we then rolled out the “Skip the rental counter” OOH campaign nationwide, appearing in several major airports and cities in Q4 2024. We also ran the campaign digitally, including in United Airlines in-flight entertainment placements.
Doubling down of the campaign’s success, this campaign ran again in 2025 in major airports and cities across the US, adapting it for use in Canada as well. We also expanded in-flight entertainment ads to Southwest Airlines, and even ran it in Times Square in New York.
“The mundane, colorless process of renting a car becomes a colorful, cinematic experience with Turo in a campaign for the rental platform.”
Credits
Photographer: Jeff Ludes
Creative Directors: Megan Natt, Ericka Ames
Copywriters: Megan Natt, Ranen Parry
Art Directors: Ericka Ames, Sam Hensley
Designers: Jackie Brown, Sam Hensley, Eric Steele, Andrew Sampson
TVC: The brief
Invigorated by the strong performance of the out-of-campaign in 2024, the team decided to adapt the “Skip the rental counter” concept into a TV spot to diversify our media buy and drive awareness and action ahead of the summer 2025 travel season.
The spot needed to feel aligned with the out-of-home creative, while being inspiring and impactful to drive action on the small screen.
TVC: The solution
We started by concepting multiple potential stories and executions to transform the ethos of the OOH campaign into video format. We then pitched four concepts to an internal working group, including the CMO and VP of Brand Marketing. We skinnied the options down from four to three, incorporating all relevant feedback, and engaged our production partner, SixTwentySix, to help us storyboard them out for testing.
Instead of static storyboards, we created three distinct animatics to test the concepts in a higher fidelity way, and dropped those into Zappi, our creative testing tool. We emerged with a clear winner — “Technicolor dreams” — which exceeded our target score. Engaging with director Nolan Goff, we made the concept into a shiny, polished, cinematic spot. After a successful two-day shoot in Barcelona (shooting abroad actually saved us a lot of budget to direct toward post production), we emerged with a 15-, a 30-, and two six-second spots in just under five months.
The results
The “Skip the rental counter” campaign went live on June 2, 2025 and was covered in AdAge's Creativity Roundup — Campaigns You Need to Know About Today — “The mundane, colorless process of renting a car becomes a colorful, cinematic experience with Turo in a campaign for the rental platform”. It was also featured in SixTwentySix’s newsletter, where they characterize it: “Our latest spot for Turo flips the airport rental nightmare into a bold, cinematic journey. What starts in rental counter chaos transforms into freedom on the open road, with each transition building momentum. The result is a visual metaphor for how effortless travel can feel with Turo.”
The press release was also picked up by Adobo Magazine: “Following the success of their award-winning brand campaign “Open the Door to Extraordinary,” car sharing marketplace Turo has once again partnered with creative studio SixTwentySix for a bold new marketing initiative, this time with a direct-response focus. Written by Turo Creative Directors Ericka Ames and Megan Natt, and directed by Nolan Goff, the new campaign, “Technicolor Dreams,” reimagines the mundane traditional car rental experience as a cinematic journey filled with color, freedom, and possibility.”
The campaign was the 2026 Telly Award Gold Winner for Craft - Directing and is a prominently featured SixTwentySix case study.
Credits
Director: Nolan Goff
Creative Directors (Client): Megan Natt, Ericka Ames
Copywriter: Megan Natt
Art Director: Ericka Ames
Director of Photography: Jenna Hukkison
Producers: Cole Sanchez (SixTwentySix), Estevan Padilla (Turo)
“The mundane, colorless process of renting a car becomes a colorful, cinematic experience with Turo in a campaign for the rental platform.”
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