Automotive advertisers continue to innovate when it comes to broadband video, with new efforts from Toyota and Mazda especially noteworthy.
Toyota has taken the user-generated route, launching a website in November featuring testimonial videos to support its hybrid vehicles, which include the Prius. www.toyota.com/hybrids opens with a video from proud owner Craig, who explains his reason for buying a Prius before saying, “Now we want to know yours,” which directs users to a page where they can select reasons why they like their vehicle and create their own entries, which can be videos. Users have submitted videos showing their families, driving through the desert and engaging in active sports, which communicate environmental and other messages that support the vehicles. Saatchi & Saatchi/Los Angeles, the agency behind the campaign, worked with Vital Stream, which converts the videos to Flash and hosts the site.
Ian Wessman, director of creative technologies at Saatchi, said Toyota hasn’t been plagued by the problem Chevy had last March when it invited users to submit :30 ads for the Tahoe and received negative submissions. “The brand is so positive no one wants to disparage it,” he said. “We thought we’d have to reject submissions but we haven’t found the need to.”
Mazda is using videos of its top cars, from the earliest models to the present, at Mazdamuseum.com, a new site developed by Sarkissian Mason/New York in December. The Sarkissian Mason crew traveled to company headquarters in Hiroshima, Japan, to film cars at the corporate museum and to Mallorca, where three new concept cars were being introduced. The videos feature shots of the cars from all angles, sometimes in motion, with interviews of the designers. “It’s documentary style video, some of it shot in film, some in MiniDV,” said Sarkissian Mason creative director Daniel Ravine.
The goal of the site is to “bring out the sense of design history,” Ravine said. “Mazda has always promoted sports cars; this shows that Mazda has well designed cars.”
The site promotes new sales by documenting Mazda’s history of building beautiful cars. “It catalogs their achievements to strengthen the brand today,” Ravine said.
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More