Portacool Keep America Cool Puts Evaporative Cooling on the National Stage
Keep America Cool is Portacool's first-ever national brand campaign, launched in the United States in June 2022 by independent agency Bray & Co, using long-form storytelling, AI-assisted media placement, and more than 300 creative assets to establish the evaporative cooler brand as a household name across the country.
Portacool has operated in the evaporative cooling category for more than 30 years, according to Ben Wulf, CEO of Portacool. Despite that heritage, the brand had never mounted a coordinated national advertising effort before this moment. The Keep America Cool campaign changes that posture entirely. Rather than relying on trade-driven or regional awareness, Portacool and Bray & Co set out to reach everyday Americans returning to outdoor and industrial work environments as temperatures climbed across the nation. The campaign's timing in summer 2022 was deliberate, meeting consumers in the United States precisely when their need for portable cooling solutions is most acute.
The campaign's core creative output centres on 60-second brand films supported by 30-second and 15-second spots. These shorter formats serve performance and retargeting functions, while the longer films carry the brand's storytelling weight. In all, more than 300 assets were produced for the campaign, giving Bray & Co and Portacool the creative inventory needed to sustain presence across a wide media footprint without creative fatigue. Bray & Co won the Portacool account following a competitive pitch in which no incumbent agency held the business, as reported by EINPresswire, underscoring how deliberate the brand was in selecting its first national partner. Portacool's Clapboard Score for the Keep America Cool campaign sits at 59 out of 100, reflecting a solid structural foundation in channel diversity and creative volume, while indicating room to grow in measurable brand impact as the campaign matures.
Bray & Co built the Keep America Cool media strategy around precision targeting rather than broad reach alone. The national media plan spans TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, connected TV, programmatic display, YouTube, and search, covering both upper-funnel brand building and lower-funnel conversion environments across the United States. What distinguishes the approach is the integration of IBM Watson AI to generate predictive media datasets, enabling smarter, forward-looking media buying rather than relying solely on historical performance signals.
The strategic rationale connects directly to the category's growth trajectory. The global evaporative cooling market was estimated at approximately 5.67 billion US dollars in 2021 and is forecast to reach approximately 8.41 billion US dollars by 2027, representing a compound annual growth rate of around 6.5 percent for the period from 2022 to 2027, according to Market Publishers. In the United States specifically, the post-pandemic return to job sites, warehouses, and outdoor spaces created a moment of genuine consumer receptivity for a brand like Portacool. Peter Bray, CCO at Bray & Co, noted that the agency quickly recognised how authentic Portacool is and how open the company was to innovative advertising designed to extend its lead in the evaporative cooling category.
Competitors in the portable cooling space, including Hessaire and Bonaire, serve portions of the same residential and light-industrial segments that Portacool targets in the United States. By committing to a fully integrated, AI-informed national campaign rather than a category-conventional product-push approach, Portacool and Bray & Co are positioning the brand above tactical seasonal advertising and toward durable household recognition. LinkedIn's inclusion in the channel mix is a particularly pointed choice, signalling that Portacool is simultaneously pursuing facility managers and procurement decision-makers alongside the general consumer audience.
Keep America Cool marks a deliberate break from conventional household and garden product advertising. Where most entries in the portable cooling category lean on product specifications and feature comparisons, Bray & Co chose a narrative-first approach, using 60-second brand films as the creative anchor for the entire campaign. The extended runtime is significant: in a category where 15-second product spots dominate, a 60-second storytelling format signals that Portacool is investing in emotional resonance, not just purchase intent.
Peter Bray, CCO at Bray & Co, served as the creative lead on the campaign and articulated the philosophy directly. As reported by EINPresswire, Bray stated that when two companies share aspirations, they inspire each other, and that the great storytelling in Keep America Cool combined with innovative data-driven advertising tactics is the result of that shared ambition. This framing is consistent with the production scale: more than 300 assets across multiple formats and channels requires a unifying creative idea strong enough to hold coherence at volume, and the Keep America Cool line provides that anchor.
The campaign's visual and tonal sensibility connects to working Americans in physical environments — job sites, backyards, and industrial spaces across the United States — where evaporative cooling is not a luxury but a practical necessity. This grounds the storytelling in authenticity rather than aspiration, a choice consistent with Portacool's 30-year heritage in the category. Production credits beyond Peter Bray's creative direction are not fully documented in publicly available sources for the Keep America Cool campaign. The integration of AI-informed placement through IBM Watson means the creative assets were also engineered for contextual relevance, with predictive datasets shaping where and when each piece of content reached its intended audience across the US market.
Verified third-party performance data for the Keep America Cool campaign at scale is limited in what is publicly available. One indexed video asset titled '2022 Keep America Cool 30 second', published on July 11, 2022, recorded 595 views with no documented engagement in the form of likes or comments at the time of indexing, according to Clapboard. This figure reflects a single asset's early public footprint rather than the campaign's full paid-media performance, which ran across connected TV, programmatic display, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and search simultaneously.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several hallmarks of effective national brand launches in the United States. The combination of 60-second brand films for upper-funnel storytelling, 30-second mid-funnel formats, and 15-second performance-oriented spots creates a full-funnel creative architecture. The 300-plus asset volume reduces creative fatigue across a multi-channel media environment, while IBM Watson's predictive datasets provide a measurable targeting advantage over category competitors relying on standard third-party data alone.
Ben Wulf, CEO of Portacool, described the campaign as the right moment to reinforce the brand's relevance as people returned to work and temperatures rose across the nation. That positioning — utility meeting timing — is a structurally sound brief for a household and garden product category defined by seasonal demand. The Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100 for Keep America Cool reflects a campaign that is well-constructed in its channel strategy and creative ambition, while acknowledging that without deeper public performance data, the full commercial impact of Portacool's first national campaign remains to be substantiated through subsequent reporting.
Keep America Cool is Portacool's first national brand campaign, launched in the United States in June 2022. Created by independent agency Bray & Co, the campaign uses long-form storytelling, more than 300 creative assets, and IBM Watson AI-driven media placement across TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, connected TV, YouTube, and search.
Bray & Co created the Keep America Cool campaign. The independent strategy, media, and creative agency won the Portacool account following a competitive pitch in which no incumbent agency held the business, becoming Portacool's first named agency of record for a national campaign, as reported by EINPresswire.
Bray & Co integrated IBM Watson AI to generate predictive media datasets for the Keep America Cool campaign. This enabled forward-looking, targeted media buying across channels in the United States rather than relying solely on historical data, distinguishing the campaign's approach from standard programmatic practice in the household product category.
More than 300 assets were produced for Keep America Cool. The core creative formats are 60-second brand films supported by 30-second and 15-second spots. This volume was designed to sustain presence across a broad multi-channel media footprint in the United States without creative fatigue throughout the 2022 campaign period.
Portacool's Keep America Cool campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 59 out of 100. The score reflects a solid structural foundation in channel diversity, creative volume, and AI-driven targeting, while indicating room to grow in documented, measurable brand impact as independent performance data for the 2022 United States campaign becomes more widely available.
Portacool launched Keep America Cool in 2022 as Americans returned to outdoor and industrial work environments amid rising summer temperatures. Ben Wulf, CEO of Portacool, stated that after more than 30 years in the evaporative cooling category, 2022 was the right time to establish national brand presence and pursue a growth mandate across the United States.
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