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.
Writers of “Conclave,” “Say Nothing” Win Scripter Awards
The authors and screenwriters behind the film โConclaveโ and the series โSay Nothingโ won the 37th-annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards during a black-tie ceremony at USCโs Town and Gown ballroom on Saturday evening (2/22).
The Scripter Awards recognize the yearโs most accomplished adaptations of the written word for the screen, including both feature-length films and episodic series.
Novelist Robert Harris and screenwriter Peter Straughan took home the award for โConclave.โ
In accepting the award, Straughan said, โAdaptation is a really strange process, youโre very much the servant of two masters. In a way itโs an act of betrayal of one master for the other.โ He joked that โYou start off with a book that you love, you read it again and again, and then you end up throwing it over your shoulder,โ crediting author Robert Harris for being โso kind, so generous, so open throughout.โ
In the episodic series category, Joshua Zetumer and Patrick Radden Keefe won for the episode โThe People in the Dirtโ from the limited series โSay Nothing,โ which Zetumer adapted from Keefeโs nonfiction book about the Troubles in Ireland.
Zetumer referenced this yearโs extraordinary group of Scripter finalists, saying โprojects like these reminded me of why I wanted to become a writer when I was sitting in USCโs Leavey Library dreaming of becoming a screenwriter. If you fell in love with movies, or fell in love with TV, chances are you fell in love with something dangerous.โ
Special guest for the evening, actress and producer Jennifer Beals, shared her thoughts on the impact of libraries. โIf ever you are at a loss wondering if there is good in the world,โ she said, โyou have only to go to a... Read More