Ferris Bueller Grows Up and Drives a Honda CRV

Honda has released its full Super Bowl CRV ad featuring Matthew Broderick as a grown up Ferris Bueller. The video is at 307 views right now. I'm guessing it will be over a million before the end of the day.

The trend of releasing your Super Bowl ad a week or so before the big game was one VW did last year with their child Darth Vader "The Force" ad (now at over 49 million views.)  By the time the Super Bowl kicked off, the online video had over 4 million YouTube views with no media driving to the commercial, everything was simply online buzz.

Like the Darth Vader ad, the Ferris Bueller ad appeals to the nostalgia of GenX consumers who are definitely the key buyers of CRVs (and VW Passats too.) So if you are going to go big with your nostalgic movie rights ad buy, the Super Bowl is the platform to do it at.

Also, look forward to next week's post where I'll be doing the Third Annual She Said, He Said Super Bowl Analysis with Melanie Walker Batenchuk over at the BeCarChic blog.

Who Knew Headlights Could Be So Cool?

The Super Bowl is quickly approaching and we are starting to see the ads show up online.  One of the more entertaining examples is Audi's latest featuring the S7 and campfire party full of vampires. 
One of the more difficult tasks of a marketing team is finding creative ways to make keyless entry, moonroofs and headlights interesting as part of a larger marketing campaign.  Featuring something pretty much every car in your segment has is not the most compelling product advantage, but there it exists in the Creative Brief... HD Headlamps. 
Audi's creative team had some fun with a rather mundane feature. Cue the 80s Echo and the Bunnymen song and add a group of attractive college aged Twilight-esque party-goers then find your creative hook that brings it all to an entertaining, unexpected end.
Brilliant. Nice work Audi.

Toyota What the--?!

There are some things I just do not get. Perhaps it's more about turning 40 years old in about a month or the fact that I haven't read a comic book in 25 years? Whatever the reason, the latest co-branding content marketing concept from Toyota makes no sense to me and in fact leaves a painful grating sound in my ears that is sure to annoy me for the next hour.

What I'm talking about is a video content collaboration between the Toyota Yaris and Marvel's What the--?! which is Marvel's self parody comic book.

Perhaps that is what's so annoying about the content. It is self-deprecating parody from the comic book company instead of someone else mocking them.  Add the self-mockery with some automotive brand advertising and you get something quite odd. Leaving one YouTube watcher to state the obvious: "I like these but kinda weird."

So what do you think?  Are you a fan of Marvel's What the--!? and I'm not the target here so I'm missing what's cool about this?

Though I do like their mocking of Cleveland (especially after Cleveland mocked Detroit.)