Toyota Yaris Australian TV Ad: Audience and Brand Conflict
Here’s the ad causing all the controversy.
How did that get out there?
Toyota Australia’s agency Saatchi & Saatchi created the Clever Film Competition.
Production houses were invited to pitch to Toyota “what you would put together for a commercial for a Yaris.”
First prize: $7,000, second prize: $3,000, third prize: $1,000 (all figures Australian dollars).
How would they decide the top 10 candidate films?
The 10 most popular films in terms of comments and views will be the competition finalists.
A panel of judges will choose the top 3 films according to their creativity and originality.
The entry above, Clean Getaways, currently would be 1 of those top 10.
And that gets us to the meat of the matter.
What if your audience’s opinion and your brand position are in conflict?
Or, to put it more radically, can your audience be right and your brand position wrong?
To answer realistically, I think it depends on the brand.
But the invitation for people to co-create advertising poses a provocative question about who owns the creation of meaning around a brand.
The brand? The customers? Some balance of the 2?
I think each group responsible for a brand needs to decide for themselves.
Because now anyone is armed with the tools to compete in making meaning, and the feedback loops of popularity in digital media amplify the representations that resonate.
Clever brands will work with distributed creative people to guide the creative process and reward results, wherever they fall on the balance of meaning making.
Actions being the most interesting kind of meaning making of all. Showing instead of telling.
Now what do you think?
Tags:
Australia, brands, Clever Film Comp, co-creation, competitions, Contests, Saatchi & Saatchi, spec work, Toyota Yaris
More AdHack Goodness? Subscribe!
AdHack Blog by RSS | 
AdHack Blog by Email
AdHack Ad Creative Marketplace
AdHack is the marketplace for ad creative. We connect Ad Buyers and Ad Creators and help them both win.
No Comments Yet