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Iveco Truck Queens Puts Women at the Wheel of Change
Iveco's Truck Queens is a 2021 documentary-style branded content campaign created by Ogilvy for Iveco in Italy, released on International Women's Day to profile three real women building careers inside the male-dominated trucking industry and challenge the preconceptions that have long kept women out of it.
The campaign centres on three protagonists whose professional lives span the full breadth of the trucks business. Judith Ehrmann works as a mechanic for Team Schwabentruck, a truck racing outfit. Lorella Della Torre holds the position of Truck Sales Manager at Iveco, a role she effectively invented when she entered the company in the 1980s. Oti Cabadas is a professional truck driver. Together, their stories form a single, coherent argument: that the automotive industry in Italy — and specifically the trucking sector — is not inherently closed to women, but has simply lacked the visibility and institutional support that would make their participation legible to the next generation.
In Italy, where the transport and logistics sector remains one of the most gender-skewed professional environments in the broader automotive market, the choice to anchor the campaign to International Women's Day on 8 March 2021 was both culturally precise and strategically deliberate. The campaign was produced by Freeda, a media company focused on content for women and younger audiences, and distributed through the IVECO LIVE CHANNEL alongside Iveco's own social channels and Freeda's social channels, according to iveco.com. This multi-channel release strategy ensured the film reached both existing commercial audiences and a wider consumer public unlikely to encounter Iveco content through conventional automotive media. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100, reflecting solid creative intent and meaningful real-world recognition across multiple award categories.
Iveco operates in one of the most persistently male-dominated segments of the automotive industry. The trucking sector — encompassing drivers, mechanics, sales professionals, and racing personnel — has historically presented structural and cultural barriers that deter women from entering or advancing within it. Truck Queens addresses that gap not through abstraction but through testimony, choosing real employees and industry participants over fictional archetypes.
The strategic logic of the campaign sits at the intersection of employer branding, purpose-led marketing, and audience expansion. By aligning with International Women's Day 2021, Iveco positioned the brand as an active agent of gender equality rather than a passive observer, a distinction that carries commercial weight in a market where fleet buyers, logistics operators, and public-sector procurement increasingly factor corporate values into purchasing decisions. The campaign's production partner, Freeda, brought an established audience of younger, purpose-aware consumers to the distribution equation, extending Iveco's reach well beyond the traditional trucks business media environment, as documented by iveco.com.
The competitive context matters here. Daimler Truck, one of Iveco's principal rivals in the European commercial vehicle segment, has invested in its own diversity and inclusion communications, according to daimlertruck.com, while MAN Truck and Bus has similarly pursued employer-brand content targeting non-traditional audiences, as reported by Press Mantruckandbus. Against this backdrop, Iveco's decision to produce a documentary rather than a conventional advertisement — and to co-produce it with a media brand explicitly built around women's perspectives — represents a differentiated creative and strategic position within the automotive category in Italy and across the broader EMEA market that Ogilvy was engaged to serve, following the agency's win of the Iveco EMEA pitch in July 2019, per engage.it.
Truck Queens is built on the credibility of its subjects. The film eschews the polished artifice common to automotive advertising in favour of a documentary register that foregrounds personal testimony, physical environment, and professional identity. Judith Ehrmann, Lorella Della Torre, and Oti Cabadas speak in their own words, describing careers shaped by resistance and persistence rather than institutional welcome.
Ehrmann's account of her entry into truck racing mechanics is particularly direct. As documented by iveco.com, she recalls: "It was always bustling, you got dirty, and it was fun to watch the guys work. That's how I understood I wanted to be a mechanic, and so I got started." Della Torre's testimony carries a different but equally resonant weight. According to iveco.com, she describes her entry into Iveco sales in the 1980s in these terms: "In the Eighties, when I started working in sales, the role of saleswoman didn't exist, so I created it. I entered an entirely male environment, where there was no room for me." These are not constructed narratives. They are professional histories, and the film's creative direction trusts them to carry the emotional and argumentative load without embellishment.
The production was executed by Freeda, whose editorial identity — content designed for and distributed to women and younger audiences — shaped not only the distribution strategy but the aesthetic sensibility of the film itself. The branded content format, developed with Ogilvy for Iveco, sits closer to editorial documentary than to traditional advertising, a choice that reflects both the subject matter and the intended audience's relationship with purpose-driven content. Production credits beyond Freeda's institutional involvement are not publicly documented for Truck Queens. The campaign was submitted to the public record by Danielantonio Di Palma, Global Head of Social Automotive at Motorsport Network, situating the work within a broader motorsport and automotive media ecosystem attentive to inclusion as a competitive theme.
Truck Queens achieved verified, externally recognised results in the Italian market. On 18 October 2021, the campaign won three NC Digital Awards in Italy, according to iveco.com: first place in the Digital Branded Content B2B category, second place in the Grand Prix Facebook and Instagram category, and third place in the Digital Branded Content B2C category. These three placements across both business-facing and consumer-facing categories confirm that the campaign performed with unusual breadth, resonating in professional contexts while simultaneously reaching general audiences through social platforms.
The campaign accumulated more than 202,000 views and 234 likes as recorded in the campaign archive, figures consistent with a branded content film distributed across owned, earned, and partner channels rather than paid media at scale. The five comments on record suggest the campaign generated relatively contained but qualitatively engaged interaction — a pattern typical of documentary-format content that prompts reflection rather than reactive social sharing.
The Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its purpose clearly and earns institutional recognition but stops short of breakthrough cultural impact. The structural effectiveness of Truck Queens rests on its choice to foreground real people over brand messaging, its alignment with a culturally high-salience moment in International Women's Day, and its use of a credible third-party production partner in Freeda. These choices made the campaign legible and trustworthy across multiple audience segments in Italy simultaneously, which the NC Digital Awards results confirm in concrete competitive terms.
Truck Queens is a 2021 documentary-style branded content campaign created by Ogilvy for Iveco in Italy. Released on International Women's Day, it profiles three real women — a truck racing mechanic, a sales manager, and a truck driver — who built careers inside the male-dominated trucking industry and challenged gender barriers throughout their professional lives.
The three women are Judith Ehrmann, a mechanic for truck racing team Schwabentruck; Lorella Della Torre, an Iveco Truck Sales Manager who created the saleswoman role at the company in the 1980s; and Oti Cabadas, a professional truck driver. All three appear in their own words, sharing personal accounts of working in the trucks business.
Truck Queens won three NC Digital Awards in Italy on 18 October 2021, according to iveco.com. The campaign placed first in Digital Branded Content B2B, second in Grand Prix Facebook and Instagram, and third in Digital Branded Content B2C — demonstrating performance across both professional and consumer-facing digital content categories simultaneously.
Ogilvy created Truck Queens for Iveco. The film was produced by Freeda, a media company focused on content for women and younger audiences. Ogilvy had held the Iveco EMEA account since winning a pitch in July 2019, per engage.it, making Truck Queens part of an established strategic relationship between the agency and brand.
The campaign launched on 8 March 2021, International Women's Day, and was distributed through the IVECO LIVE CHANNEL, Iveco's own social media channels, and Freeda's social channels, according to iveco.com. It was formally published in campaign archives as an October 2021 Italy-based project, reflecting the month its award recognition was announced.
Truck Queens holds a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that executes its gender equality purpose clearly, earns multi-category award recognition at the NC Digital Awards Italy, and reaches broad audiences through credible documentary-format storytelling, while stopping short of the cultural breakthrough that would push scores into higher territory.
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