In 2026, the company introduced the biggest Time Between Overhaul increase in its history: a new 2600 hour TBO for a large majority of factory new and rebuilt fixed wing engines, an additional 400 hours over the previous 2200 hour standard, with rotorcraft engines receiving an additional 300 hours as well.
Lycoming came to us with the announcement already defined. We took full creative direction and led the translation of that engineering milestone into an aircraft engine marketing campaign for Lycoming by Avian Creative, building a cohesive visual system and rolling it out across every touchpoint a pilot, owner, or operator was likely to encounter: print, digital, and the show floor.
The challenge was making that number feel like what it actually was for operators, hundreds of additional hours of dependable power, more time in the air, and less time counting down to the next overhaul, while carrying the weight of Lycoming’s 97 year legacy of engine reliability.
The campaign also had to work across very different formats and reading conditions: a brochure read cover to cover, a landing page skimmed in seconds, a magazine spread glanced at between articles, and a banner seen from across a convention hall. It also had to carry Lycoming’s required eligibility disclaimers, exclusions for turbocharged, high speed, and high horsepower models, without losing the boldness of the announcement.
Every campaign starts with one idea strong enough to carry the whole system, and we went through several before landing on this one. Early directions treated the TBO extension the way most engine announcements do, spec sheets, stopwatch icons, generic countdown graphics, but nothing made the number 2600 feel earned. The breakthrough came from looking at the engine itself: the spinner back plate, ringed with bolts and centered on the Lycoming logo, is already shaped like a clock face.
We leaned all the way into that resemblance. We placed hour markers, 1 through 12, in Lycoming red directly onto the spinner back plate, turning the engine’s own geometry into a literal clock. The idea writes the headline for us: this is an engine that has quite literally had more time added onto it. It’s not a stopwatch bolted on top of a product shot, it’s the product making the argument. That single image, the clock built into the engine, became the anchor graphic for the brochure, print ad, and banner, so the campaign reads as one idea everywhere it shows up, not a logo and a tagline reapplied across different formats.
A landing page or ad can carry a headline, but it can’t carry the full weight of a technical announcement, and the first thing every pilot and distributor wants to know is whether their specific engine qualifies. The brochure exists to answer that question completely, in Lycoming’s own language, without a phone call. We built it to work as a leave-behind that a distributor could hand over and trust to do the explaining on its own, anchored in the same clock-engine identity so it never reads as a separate technical insert bolted onto the campaign.
People would meet this announcement in very different states of attention, a pilot who just scanned a QR code off the banner at Oshkosh, someone searching “Lycoming TBO” cold, a distributor pulling it up mid-conversation. The landing page had to work for all three: fast enough to answer the eligibility question before someone bounces, but deep enough to hold the FAQ a more skeptical reader needs, and built to route every one of those visitors to a real distributor rather than let the moment die on the page.
Trade publication readers flip pages; almost nothing gets a second look. The ad had to earn recognition in less than a second, which meant stripping it down to the one asset that already carried the whole idea and trusting it to do the work alone, rather than competing for attention with paragraphs of copy. If the clock-engine image is strong enough, the ad doesn’t need to explain itself.
A show floor is the one environment where Lycoming is competing directly, booth to booth, for the same walking audience. The banner’s job isn’t to close the sale, that happens face to face with a distributor, it’s to win the glance from thirty feet away and give someone a reason to walk over. That meant the banner had to be legible and unmistakable from a distance, which is exactly why we leaned on the same single image rather than trying to fit the full story onto it.
Show-ready and publication-ready assets that let distributors and Lycoming staff carry the same story wherever they encounter it.
Across every deliverable, the campaign gives Lycoming a single, unmistakable creative identity for the 2600 hour TBO announcement, one built to move an engineering milestone off a service bulletin and into the hands of pilots, owners, and distributors wherever they encounter it.
One ownable image, the clock built into the engine, that makes the announcement instantly recognizable across brochure, web, print, and event channels
A landing page and brochure structured around the questions operators actually ask first: does my engine qualify, and when
Show-ready and publication-ready assets that let distributors and Lycoming staff carry the same story from the convention floor to the mailbox
With the brochure, landing page, magazine ad, and banner all built out around that same idea, we’re continuing to support Lycoming across every aspect of the campaign as it rolls out to distributors and trade publications. We’re already looking forward to the next campaign we get to build together.
