The Brief

Automobile sales in Japan have slumped for nearly 20 years. Nowdays young people have little interest in cars. Indeed, the typical young adult views cars as troublesome to own, costly to keep up with and a pain to drive. We were asked by Toyota to develope a campagin that would affect a genuine change in young people's perception of cars. To achieve that, we would have to take a route other than mass media, which almost certainly wouldn't move our target's heart.

Creative Execution

Young people are increasingly becoming immune to mass media advertising. Particularly with big-ticket items like cars, experience-based communicaton is the best way to influence people. Our main insight: young people are highly influenced by the opinions of friends. That's why we focused in university clubs, which are tight-knit groups with an obvious common interest. A key piece of our creative was recordings we made of the students commenting on their feelings about cars and their experiences with their own Toyota. Through these videos, which we widely posted, we tracked genuine sense of change in their perception.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Via lottery, we offered university clubs free use of a Toyota car for one month. This gave thousands of students the chance to experience the freedom of owning a car. To spread the word, we simply created posters showing club members with their cars and placed them as outdoor advertising near univeristies; and strategically conducted PR with magazines. With little money and a great idea, we got the word out and let it spread virally. Sure enough, college bloggers picked up the story and the national media followed. Our website featured running narrative of the campaign, serving as its nexus.

Results

Clearly, students loved the experience of owning the car. We conducted and recorded interviews with students before and after having the car; 60% said their opinions of car ownership had changed for the positive. Thanks to extensive mass media coverage partially instigated by our strategic placement of PR in magazine the campaign attained a 40% recognition rating, which is phenomenal considering that our sole use of advertising media comprised outdoor media at train stations near universities. Toyota, which had never before undertaken such experience-based communication, was sufficiently impressed to want to continue conducting this kind of campaign.