Nintendo destroyed YouTube to help sell Wario Land: Shake It, but now Honda is proving that you don’t need to destroy a video portal to impress viewers with out of the box thinking. (For comparison, Crank: High Voltage pretty much took the Wario Land: Shake It model and copied it to a T. They did switch to Break.com for their video, though I’m guessing it was for no other reason than the placement could be bought for less.)
Honda’s Insight ad, called Let It Shine, takes the Vimeo window and turns each element into a part of the show. The original concept for the commercial was an animated film made entirely of car headlights, and Wieden+Kennedy put together a rather impressive behind the scenes video to show what went into making it all work:
On Vimeo however, when you press play, the entire site dims and then fades to black, as each word in the title is illuminated in sequence. From there, the video begins, but instead of being constrained to the dimensions of a traditional Vimeo video, the background aligns with what’s being shown in the video, and certain parts of the animation continue on outside of the video area, extending the idea across the entire screen.
One of the most obvious examples of this cross-window magic is the profile image, which becomes a mini movie of the Eco Assist logo turning into the sun, which in turn brightens up the site to match the sun rising in the ad, and then shoots a lens flare across the site to put a final exclamation point on the experience before changing the background to a stark red logo on white background splash screen, and then finally returning everything back to normal. Combine that with a catchy and whimsical tune that everyone knows from his or her childhood, and the ad takes on a memorable quality that’s hard to replicate with any other medium.
The Good:
- Unexpected actions inside of a familiar video portal cut through our mental ad filters and encourage user-to-user pass-along.
- With a little bit of coding and production work, Honda was able to give their television commercial a second life online without having to create content that was exclusively and specifically designed for the online audience.
The Bad:
- Custom coding limits the experience to one video portal, and can’t be embedded for external viewing on other sites.
The Future:
- Companies look to not only show their ads online, but also to integrate their ads into the online world in new and unique ways so that it feels less like and ad and more like an experience.
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Wed, May 6, 2009
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