Slate.com reports on a strange online game created to promote Toyota. In the game you play a "Little Deviant" who drives around in a Toyota Scion and commits violent crimes on "Sheeple", including "pummeling, slicing, and dismembering" with lots of flying green blood.
Since Toyota wants the Scion to be a niche product, it wants the campaign to be polarizing. "People that find it offensive are not our target," says Simon Needham, co-founder of ATTIK, the agency that's designed every major Scion campaign. If square grandmas reject the Scion for the Nissan Versa, the thinking goes, that will only boost the Scion's image among the cool kids.
Adland® is a commercial-laden heaven and hell for advertising addicts around the world.
This advertising publication was founded in 1996, built on beer and bravery, Adland® now boasts the largest super bowl commercials collection in the world.
Adland® survives on your donations alone. You can help us out by buying us a Ko-Fi. Adland® works best in Brave browser
I thought the sheep were going to be more sheep like and less human like. Also, can you really advertise deviance? It's so not deviant to go online and play a big corporation's game...
- reply
PermalinkThat's exactly the problem. But advertising has always tried to convince you that a certain product is somehow rebellious, and it's always (or almost always) bullshit because buying products from major corporations is inherently unrebellious. It's like the ad people are either too stupid to realize this themselves, or, more likely, assume that their intended audience is too stupid to notice. With the whole Scion thing, I wonder if the target audience is so young and maleducated that the latter might actually be a correct assumption. Which is to say, either stupid people with sophomoric senses of humor who are too dumb to understand they're being manipulated will be influenced in their purchasing decisions by this ad, or the ad will be a failure and actually backfire as people get resentful for being so nakedly manipulated.
The whole sheep thing is so played out, anyway. If you're doing what the corporations tell you to, you're the fucking sheep.
- reply
Permalink