Prestone Defying the Elements Puts Six Drivers to the Ultimate Test
Prestone's "Defying the Elements – Motor Trend Presents" is a 2017 content-medium campaign produced by Schiefer Chopshop and published in the United States in October of that year, structured as a single-episode branded instalment of the Motor Trend Presents series in which six drivers prepare for and succeed in demanding racing conditions as a direct demonstration of Prestone's vehicle protection credentials.
The campaign enters the market at a moment when Prestone, then owned by Centerbridge Partners following its acquisition from Honeywell for a reported two hundred and thirty million dollars in April 2016 as documented by adsoftheworld.com, needed to reassert its authority in a competitive automotive fluids category. Rather than relying on product-specification advertising or retail promotional messaging, Prestone and Schiefer Chopshop chose the editorial infrastructure of Motor Trend to deliver the brand's core promise inside a format that automotive enthusiasts already trust and seek out. In the United States, where the performance automotive media ecosystem is well established and consumer attention to branded content has grown significantly, this alignment offered Prestone access to an audience predisposed to take product performance claims seriously when they are demonstrated rather than stated.
The campaign's mechanics centre on a single media asset: the Motor Trend Presents episode itself, which follows six drivers navigating extreme conditions that stress both machine and fluid systems. The format is immersive and episodic rather than interruptive, positioning Prestone not as a sponsor overlay but as the enabling force behind the drivers' success. This structural choice reflects a broader industry shift toward content partnerships as a primary vehicle for brand storytelling in the United States automotive market. Clapboard scores this campaign 71 out of 100, reflecting the strength of its strategic alignment and format selection against the absence of publicly verified performance data.
Prestone operates in a category where purchase decisions are driven by trust, technical credibility, and brand familiarity rather than impulse or aspiration. In the United States automotive aftermarket, consumers choosing antifreeze and coolant products frequently default to heritage brands, making it difficult for any single campaign to shift consideration through conventional advertising alone. Schiefer Chopshop's strategic response was to bypass the traditional television spot and embed Prestone inside a piece of content that Motor Trend's audience would consume on its own merits, allowing the brand's performance narrative to land without the resistance that accompanies overt advertising.
According to marketsandmarkets.com, the global automotive antifreeze market was valued at approximately six hundred and eighty-eight million US dollars in 2016, with a projected compound annual growth rate of around five percent through 2021, indicating a steadily expanding but competitive environment in which brand differentiation is commercially meaningful. Major competitors in the United States market include Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BASF, and Total, each with significant distribution and brand recognition, as identified by Grand View Research. Against this competitive field, Prestone's century-long heritage — the brand was founded in 1927 according to adsoftheworld.com — provides a credible platform, but heritage alone does not close sales in a market where competing products increasingly claim comparable technical specifications.
The Motor Trend Presents partnership addresses this challenge directly. By placing the brand inside a respected automotive editorial property, Schiefer Chopshop gave Prestone a form of third-party endorsement that paid media cannot replicate. Chief Strategy Officer Jeff Roach's involvement signals that the campaign's media and message logic were developed in tandem rather than sequentially, a structural discipline that sharpens both the creative brief and the channel selection in complex content campaigns of this kind.
Schiefer Chopshop directed and produced "Defying the Elements – Motor Trend Presents" as a fully realised episodic content piece rather than a branded segment appended to existing programming. The creative approach depends on the authenticity of its six drivers and the severity of the racing conditions they face, with Prestone's vehicle protection technology functioning as the connective narrative tissue that links every competitive challenge to a product truth. This is craft-driven brand storytelling: the campaign earns its product argument through demonstration rather than declaration.
The creative leadership for the campaign is publicly documented. Zach Lyons served as chief creative officer and director, bringing both brand strategy and production vision into a single authorial role that is relatively uncommon in agency-produced content work. John Zegowitz held the position of executive creative director, shaping the episodic structure and ensuring that the Motor Trend Presents format conventions were honoured while the Prestone narrative remained legible and purposeful throughout. Jeff Roach contributed as chief strategy officer, grounding the creative execution in the consumer and category insight that the campaign's channel logic required. Additional credited personnel include Catherine Gudvangen, Chris Zamoscianyk, Tim Logan, Breesa Herrera, and Kristina Wade, reflecting a substantial production team assembled to deliver a piece of content that could credibly sit within Motor Trend's editorial universe.
The decision to centre the episode on six distinct drivers rather than a single protagonist is a meaningful creative choice. It multiplies the demonstrations of Prestone's protection across different racing disciplines and human stories, broadening the campaign's relevance without diluting the core message. In the United States, where automotive culture spans drag racing, off-road competition, circuit racing, and amateur track days, this diversity of driver profiles allows the episode to speak to a wider cross-section of the performance automotive audience while maintaining a single, coherent brand argument throughout its runtime.
No verified performance data for "Defying the Elements – Motor Trend Presents" is publicly available. No campaign-specific effectiveness figures — including sales lift, brand tracking movement, awareness change, or purchase intent shifts — have been disclosed by Prestone, Schiefer Chopshop, or any third-party measurement body. No awards recognition for this campaign has been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, the Webby Awards, or WARC, as confirmed by clapboard.com's editorial research.
Structural analysis provides a meaningful alternative lens. The campaign's decision to operate through the Motor Trend Presents format rather than conventional paid media gives it an inherent efficiency advantage: the editorial context delivers audience self-selection, meaning viewers who encounter the episode are already invested in automotive performance content and therefore predisposed to engage with Prestone's product narrative. In the United States, where automotive content consumption on digital and streaming platforms was growing substantially in 2017 according to ispot.tv's tracking of branded content distribution, this format alignment was commercially rational even without disclosed reach or viewability figures.
The six-driver structure also creates structural replay and sharing potential that a single-athlete campaign would not generate, distributing the episode's promotional surface area across multiple communities and fan bases. Schiefer Chopshop's integration of Zach Lyons in a combined creative and directorial role further reduces the translation loss that frequently occurs between strategic intent and final execution in content campaigns, a factor that likely contributes to the campaign's coherence as a brand artefact regardless of unverified commercial outcomes.
Prestone's "Defying the Elements – Motor Trend Presents" is a branded content campaign produced by Schiefer Chopshop and published in the United States in October 2017. It takes the form of a single Motor Trend Presents episode following six drivers competing in extreme racing conditions, using their performance as a direct demonstration of Prestone's vehicle protection technology.
Schiefer Chopshop created the Defying the Elements campaign for Prestone. The agency's leadership team on the project included Zach Lyons as chief creative officer and director, John Zegowitz as executive creative director, and Jeff Roach as chief strategy officer, with additional production personnel including Catherine Gudvangen, Chris Zamoscianyk, Tim Logan, Breesa Herrera, and Kristina Wade.
Prestone chose the Motor Trend Presents format to embed its brand inside editorial content that automotive enthusiasts already trust. In the United States, where heritage brands like Shell and ExxonMobil compete directly with Prestone, placing the product argument inside a credible third-party media property delivers a form of endorsement that conventional paid advertising cannot replicate.
Zach Lyons directed the Defying the Elements campaign for Prestone, holding the combined role of chief creative officer and director at Schiefer Chopshop. This dual authorial position — uncommon in agency-produced content work — allowed creative strategy and production vision to develop as a unified process rather than sequential handoffs.
No awards recognition for Defying the Elements has been identified across Cannes Lions, the Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clio, the Webby Awards, or WARC, according to clapboard.com's editorial research. No verified performance or effectiveness data has been disclosed publicly by Prestone or Schiefer Chopshop for this campaign.
Prestone's Defying the Elements campaign received a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic coherence and its effective use of the Motor Trend Presents editorial format to deliver a credible product performance argument, balanced against the absence of publicly available effectiveness or awards data.
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