Honda
19 Dec 2006Right now I love Honda - I’m an unashamed fanboy. The reason I’m feeling this way at this particular moment is that I’ve just seen the latest Wieden+Kennedy produced Honda advert, featuring Asimo walking around a technology museum. Should I therefore love Wieden+Kennedy rather than Honda - perhaps, but it’s Honda that I’m thinking about.
Every now and then a company releases an advert that you really don’t mind watching over and over again. This latest advert joins the previous three in the collection of adverts that I think show true talent, artistic skill and an intention to entertain as well as to sell.
My love of Honda adverts began with “Cog” - the honda Accord advert that took 6 months of planning, one week of shooting and 606 takes to get right. Cog is a fantastic example of a Rube Goldberg style device which legend has it ran the full way through as seen in the advert - other sources disagree and claim that it was taken in two halves due to cost and space, which is still astounding.
The next one that I remember is the “Impossible Dream” commercial, designed not to promote a specific product but instead the brand. Showing a number of famous Honda vehicles both old and new driven by a man singing along to Andy Williams, the advert comes to a climax with him plunging into the Iguasu falls and emerging singing in a Honda hot air baloon. This is a clever advert symbolising the life and dreams of Soichiro Honda that won the Meribel Awards Festival 2006 Grand Crystal award.
More recently Honda produced a new advert for the launch of the Civic: “Choir”. This advert featured a choir producing the complete soundtrack for various shots of the Civic driving about town. This advert made me smile, and again was achieved without tricks:
Finally back to the one I saw about two hours ago that inspired me to start up the computer and write this post, the new Asimo advert. Again this doesn’t really promote a particular product (Asimo doesn’t really count here) and is about the brand and their dedication to technology. Asimo is incredible, and even with recent movie clips on YouTube showing hilarious and no doubt costly accidents involving Asimo and stairs nobody can be unimpressed with the incredible control and lifelike movement on display.
This new campaign also has a web site to go with it (beware heavy use of flash, like this post!) “Human Technology” and comes with a series of five short films featuring Asimo to be available on iTunes and honda.co.uk (source).
While searching for this video, I found another Asimo one that I’ve not seen, here for your viewing pleasure anyway because it’s as good as the rest!
I hope you’ve enjoyed watching the above videos as much as I have while searching for them and writing this post. If only more adverts were made like these. If you want to learn more about Honda (and you should, they are an astounding company born largely through the incredible visions of Soichiro Honda) then read the Wikipedia article or, if you can get hold of a copy, the excellent editorial piece in the October 2006 issue of Car Magazine.