Rivian has named independent agency ‘Known’ as its new media agency of record to drive demand for vehicles and increase brand awareness, as it prepares to report third-quarter deliveries, typically released in early October.
“R2 is one of the biggest opportunities in Rivian’s history, and it deserves a marketing motor as world-class as our vehicles: integrated, data-driven and designed with a high attention to detail,” Rivian’s VP of Marketing and E-commerce Jenny Lewis said.
Rivian had previosuly worked with Publicis Groupe’s ‘Digitas.’
“Known brings media, measurement and technology together under one roof, and is a partnership built to scale with us, helping us expand our community and bring Rivian to our next wave of owners,” the executive added.
A Data-Led Media Buyer
‘Known’ framed the appointment as a push beyond Rivian’s existing buyers.
“Now it’s time to introduce this transcendent innovation to an even broader group of consumers, everywhere they are,” the company said in a LinkedIn post.
It said it would deploy its “media, data science, advanced analytics and Skeptic technology” for Rivian.
“Known brings media, measurement and technology together under one roof, and is a partnership built to scale with us, helping us expand our community and bring Rivian to our next wave of owners,” Lewis said in a statement quoted in the post.
The R2 Stakes
The R2 is Rivian’s attempt to move beyond a niche.
“We currently sell 50,000-60,000 vehicles a year. In the next couple years, we want hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year,” Denise Cherry, then Rivian’s VP of Marketing, told Digiday in May 2025.
Rivian began R2 deliveries on June 9 with the $57,990 Performance trim. Cheaper versions are due in late 2026 and 2027, starting from $44,990 for the Standard trim.
The company expects to deliver 65,000 to 70,000 vehicles in 2026, a range it raised on July 2 and reconfirmed with its second-quarter results on July 30.
It delivered 10,365 vehicles in the first quarter and 12,194 in the second, for a first-half total of 22,559 units.
That leaves 42,441 to 47,441 deliveries needed in the second half to meet guidance. In 2025, Rivian delivered 13,201 vehicles in the third quarter.
Rivian reports total deliveries only. It does not break them down by model or separate its consumer vehicles from its commercial vans.
Second-quarter growth came from “robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1 coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries,” the company said.
Registration data compiled by Cox Automotive implied about 789 R2 deliveries in the second quarter, as EV reported. Rivian has not confirmed any R2 figure.
A Year of Marketing Changes
Known is the latest change in a marketing operation that has been reorganised repeatedly around the R2 launch.
Rivian’s first national brand campaign, “Real Rivian Adventures,” launched in May 2025 with creative agency Mojo Supermarket and Digitas handling media.
In October 2025, founder and Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe became interim Chief Marketing Officer as the company cut about 4.5% of its workforce.
In January, it hired former Kohl’s and Best Buy marketing chief Greg Revelle as Chief Customer Officer and told EV it had no plans to hire a chief marketing officer.
In April, it appointed Lewis, reporting to Revelle, as EV reported.
Rivian had been buying media campaign by campaign. “Because we are still also very much a startup, we haven’t signed any annual media buys ever,” Denise Cherry, then VP of Marketing, told Digiday in May 2025.
It went public in 2021 saying it had “no agencies of record” and “no paid media,” according to its IPO prospectus.
Word of Mouth Versus Paid Media
The appointment marks a shift in tone from Scaringe’s comments around the R2 launch.
Asked at the June launch event how Rivian would reach the 48% of people who don’t know the brand, Scaringe said: “We measure it, and sometimes we come up with even higher than that,” Autoblog reported.
“We don’t have to force feed a lot of information about the company; we can let it more naturally occur, y’know, through word of mouth,” he said.
“Awareness is still nowhere near where we hope it’ll be in a couple years, but we can let awareness grow, because we have so much enthusiasm around what we’re doing,” he told Founder Brew the same month.
Rivian has not said how much it plans to spend. Advertising costs for 2023 to 2025 “were not material,” its latest annual report says.
Demo Drives at a Record
Rivian’s main sales tool remains the test drive.
It hosted more than 57,000 demo drives in the second quarter, “a Rivian record,” Scaringe said on the July 30 earnings call.
“Strong R2 reviews and increasing brand awareness are directly translating into accelerating customer touchpoints with our products,” he said.
He declined to give conversion rates but said Rivian was “witnessing a higher level of conversion than we expected, meaningfully higher than we expected into the Launch Edition package.”
The main reason reservation holders do not place orders is that “they’re waiting for a different build combination than what we have in the Launch Edition package,” he said.
“We have a significant number of first-time EV owners,” Scaringe added, describing “demand for EVs that’s been latent, that’s been sitting on the sideline.”
Rivian has never disclosed its advertising spending.
