Audi:
Plugging In.
Audi / 1000% / Milk Studios
The Challenge
Audi was launching its first-ever plug-in hybrid. The technology was genuinely new territory for the brand — and for most of its audience. The brief was to make people feel something about an electric plug, which is, historically, not an easy thing to make people feel something about.
The answer wasn't in the car. It was in a moment that happened exactly 50 years earlier, at a folk festival in Newport, Rhode Island, when a young musician walked onstage with an electric guitar and changed everything.
My Role
- Concept development
- Script
Agency
- 1000% / Milk Studios
Format
- Branded documentary film
The Insight
Audi was already a partner of the Newport Folk Festival. That's where the idea started — not as a marketing hook, but as a genuine cultural connection worth exploring. Because Newport wasn't just a music festival. It was the site of one of the most controversial moments in American music history: Bob Dylan going electric in 1965, to a crowd that booed him off the stage.
Fifty years later, nobody thinks Dylan made the wrong call. The people who booed him look, in retrospect, like they were on the wrong side of something important. Which made it a perfect frame for what Audi was doing: another first plug, another moment where "electric" was the more interesting direction, even if not everyone was ready to believe it yet.
The parallel wasn't forced. It was just true. And the best creative ideas are usually the ones that were already there, waiting for someone to notice them.
"Another first plug. Another moment where electric was the more interesting direction."The idea in one line.
The Film
The script I wrote brought together people who were at Newport in 1965 — witnesses to the moment — alongside current artists like Courtney Barnett, Jim James, and Colin Meloy, who could speak to what that act of defiance meant across the decades. The structure traced the reverberations of Dylan's choice forward through time, landing at the present moment: another kind of plug, another kind of first.
The Audi e-tron appears at the end, briefly. That restraint was intentional. This wasn't a car commercial dressed up as a documentary — it was a film that earned the brand's presence by actually being worth watching first. The product lands harder when you've already been moved by the story it's attached to.
Why It Works As a Portfolio Piece
The concept came from identifying a real connection — a brand partnership that most people would have used for a logo placement and a hospitality tent — and turning it into something with genuine cultural weight. That's the part of the job that can't be templated: recognizing what's already there and knowing what to do with it.
The script had to serve two masters simultaneously: a music documentary that stood on its own, and a brand film that justified Audi's involvement without overshadowing the story. Getting that balance right is a specific skill. The ripples from Newport are still going. So, apparently, is the brief.