Six decades of American cultural equity, inside a new operating model.
When PRISM acquired Motel 6, the brand had one of the most recognised taglines in American advertising history — "We'll leave the light on for you" — and an operating setup pulling in fifteen directions at once.
Sixty years of equity. Franchise, corporate-owned, and joint venture properties. Multiple agency relationships. Legacy vendor contracts. Regional marketing decisions that had drifted from the master brand over time. The brand was still loved. The system around it was not efficient.
I led the post-acquisition brand integration — consolidating identity, vendors, campaigns, and creative operations across the US portfolio.
Post-acquisition savings numbers get thrown around loosely. In this case, the five million came from a specific list: agency consolidation across creative, media, and production; vendor rationalisation on print, signage, and OOH; retirement of duplicative regional campaigns in favour of a single national programme; and internal team restructuring that moved a large portion of brand work in-house on an AI-first workflow that didn't exist at acquisition.
None of these are dramatic on their own. The compounding effect — and the fact that we sequenced them so brand health didn't dip while cost was coming out — is what made the year work.
Reactivate a beloved brand without making it feel like it was trying too hard.
Our first major brand campaign under the new setup, #NeverSkipATrip, brought the "We'll leave the light on for you" DNA into contemporary American culture.
The campaign leaned into the specific role Motel 6 plays in the American road trip — the affordable stop that makes the whole trip possible. Not aspiring to be premium. Not apologising for being budget. Just clear-eyed about what it is and who it's for.
Post-acquisition brand work is usually framed as either "protect the equity" or "unlock the synergies." The truth is you have to do both, and the order matters.
Protect first, unlock second, and never let the cost-out timeline dictate the brand timeline. If you flip that sequence, you save money in year one and lose customers in year two.