When Juan Perez started his new job as associate creative director/art director at TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, he couldn’t wait to take on the Nissan campaign. "I was thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll get to work on the Z,’ " he recalls, referring to the legendary sports car.
Although Perez’s first project was indeed for Nissan, it had nothing to do with the Z. Instead, it was a four-spot package for the newly redesigned Quest minivan. "I’d been fantasizing about all the wonderful things I’d get to work on, and then my first [campaign] is for a minivan," he laughs. "I was a little disappointed."
It was that type of response that led to the Quest’s creation in the first place. "Minivans have lost their sizzle," explains Rob Schwartz, executive creative director on the campaign. "They used to be really hot products, but then SUVs entered the fray, and the minivan was reduced to the boring kid-hauler. Since the carmakers kept promoting the minivan as the soccer mom mobile, they kind of shot themselves in the foot image-wise. That was the big problem Nissan wanted to solve. They said, ‘What if a minivan wasn’t a compromise—in fact, what if a minivan became a desirable product?’ "
With its SUV-like shape, bucket seats and ultra-modern features, the Quest is—to paraphrase another car campaign—not your mother’s minivan. Perez says he was pleasantly surprised. "And, added to that, I heard the [advertising] strategy wasn’t going to be a ‘Little kids raise your juice boxes!’ kind of thing."
Creatives at TBWA/Chiat/Day wanted to gear the launch toward a different type of consumer than the traditional soccer mom. "[The client] had identified the target as the modern, sexy mom," Schwartz shares. "If you look around, particularly in Los Angeles or New York, you’ll see an entirely new generation of mothers out there—what they call a ‘yummy mommy.’ They’re these totally inspirational women, and they’re pushing a stroller. This generation doesn’t look like our mothers or certainly our grandmothers, so what we tried to do with the work is recognize that. That’s why we wrote the line, ‘Moms have changed. Shouldn’t the minivan?’ "
That tagline accompanies two of the Quest spots: "Moms Have Changed/Loading," directed by Anthea Benton out of bicoastal Believe Media, and "Moms Have Changed/Features," helmed by Believe’s Pucho Mentasti—but all four of the ads in the campaign share its sentiment. In "Loading," a series of hip moms load a Quest with unexpected items like a kayak, a surfboard and a violin. "Features" depicts another mom parking a Quest and removing a huge, red yoga ball.
Another Benton-helmed spot, "Girls’ Night Out," features a quartet of glamorous mothers tooling around Los Angeles in a Quest, photographing each other with a digital camera and watching the results on the minivan’s monitor. The last shot is of a dad with two sleeping kids in his lap, waiting for mom to come home. "Lighthouse," which was directed by Mentasti, shows a couple cuddling on the beach, their unused opera tickets stashed in their nearby Quest.
All the ads highlight the features, comfort and roominess of the new minivan—with nary a juice box in sight. Balancing the campaign’s concept with the practicalities of automotive advertising was important for both the agency and the client. "As a client, your initial instinct is: ‘Must show product. Must show features.’ It’s almost robotic," Schwartz observes. "But by the same token, I think everyone recognized early on that [appealing to] the modern sexy mom was a big idea."
Being a mother herself, Benton could certainly relate to the material. But when Perez first saw her reel, he "did not even realize that she was a woman." What attracted his attention was the quality of her work. "Her reel had cars on it, and the cars looked beautiful," he says. "The visuals were so graphic and saturated and colorful that I thought they would be appropriate for the message we were trying to send out. But she also managed to tell stories."
When he found out she was a woman, that didn’t hurt either. "This is, oddly enough, a little bit of reverse sexism," he shares. "But I really felt that she understood the spots and the people we were talking to in a way that none of the other directors could."
Interestingly enough, nearly everyone on the "Loading" and "Girls’ Night Out" shoots was female. "The clients were all women, the director was a woman, the producers were all women, the account person, the actresses," Perez remembers. "There was a lot of fun that went with that. I became the butt of every bit of male [related] angst. I represented all the evils of every man that ever did anything to any woman on that set."
Perez says he enjoyed working with Benton. "Not only did she have a grip on the story, which was primarily what I was looking for, but she was so technically adept," he relates. "Particularly on [‘Loading’]. That was all motion control, and we had the time of day changing and various women loading things and a lot of green-screen. It was a very tedious, slow process, and all of it had to be planned out well ahead of time. She did all the research, and got all the shots. And it wasn’t like we gave her an unlimited budget. She was great on many levels."
When Benton’s schedule prevented her from shooting "Features" and "Lighthouse," she recommended Mentasti. And, while Perez says he was equally impressed with the director, who is primarily known for the spots he directed for the Argentinean market, Perez adds that Mentasti’s style was very different from Benton’s.
"Anthea was very methodical and calculated in the way she would work. She’d say, ‘Here’s what we are going to do. Here’s what we are going to shoot. Here are the steps that we’re going to take.’ And she would go and do that exactly," he explains. "After each shot, she’d say to me, ‘Juan, here’s what we shot. Are you okay with it? Let’s move on.’ It was very organized.
"On the other hand, Pucho’s approach was like, ‘Juan, I know your concept, I understand the shots you want, and I promise you that within all this stuff that I’m shooting they’ll be in there,’ " continues Perez. "It was a lot of him setting up the camera and shooting something that wasn’t even on the boards, and then quickly moving it somewhere else and shooting a little bit more, and quickly moving it somewhere else. Initially, there were some nervous moments of, ‘Is he going to get the shot?’ But of course, he always got it."
The spots have only recently launched, but Schwartz reports that the response has already been positive: "We’ve seen and heard a lot of great things about the campaign," he relates. "Sales of the vehicle are [high], and it’s all across the country."
More modern mom-targeted ads are bound to follow. But for now, the creatives are pleased to know they’ve struck a chord. "We’ve gotten a lot of calls from people—whether it’s wives of the people who worked on it, or people in the agency—who’ve said, ‘That was so cool of you guys to celebrate rather than apologize for owning a minivan,’ " notes Schwartz.
