New Honda Campaign Spurs 'Brand Improv'

My favorite new genre of advertising is what I like to call “Brand Improv,” defined as follows: when brands are forced to think on their feet, in realtime, with no brief, no meetings, no committees, no nothing, except a certain talented someone channeling the brand and improvising messages. And there’s no better example than the new Honda campaign supporting the vacuum built into their Odyssey minivans.

Though the interesting part of the campaign is not the ad, it’s important to see that or the rest of this post will make little sense. Here it is in case you somehow, and impossibly, dodged it:

Moderately funny, nice idea, clearly communicates the fact there’s a vacuum in the car. But, as it turns out, this ad was merely setting the stage for much more interesting marketing.

Honda takes on product brands typically found on Odyssey floors
If you go to Honda’s Twitter page (https://twitter.com/Honda), you’ll see Honda humorously jabbing at the brands that are typically found on the floor of a dirty minivan: Burger King fries, Orville Redenbachers popcorn, Doritos, and many more. Tweets that humorously “warn” these brands that they better stay off the floor…or else the new Odyssey vacuum will suck them up.

Here was the first shot across the bow from Honda’s Twitter feed that set the tone:

Little dropped snacks everywhere, your days are numbered. The Odyssey with available vacuum is here. Whoooooooosh.

But then Honda got a little bolder and took on those floor-brands directly:

Hey @BurgerKing, we’ll be #Satisfried when we’ve vacuumed every one of you off our floors. – Odyssey with available HondaVAC
Now showing in the Honda Odyssey Touring Elite Theater: Attack of the Popcorn-Devouring HondaVAC. Watch out @OrvillePopcorn & @PopSecret.
Mmmmmmmm. The rainbow is tasty @Skittles. Sincerely, The Honda Odyssey Touring Elite with built-in HondaVAC.

Like a monster threatening the lives of any snack daring to fall on the Odyssey floor. Suddenly a decent TV spot becomes much more than just an ad. Now we see Honda was launching a real-world mission to clean up the floors, one snack brand at a time. But even these Tweets from Honda aren’t the most interesting part of the campaign.

The brands on the floor fight back
It’s when the brands that are “called out” by Honda start responding that the real magic happens. It’s “Brand Improv” at its best. While I couldn’t find any direct response on Twitter from BurgerKing (missed opportunity), I did see a couple others accept the challenge. Here are two.

Orville Redenbachers took full advantage with this reply-Tweet:

@Honda The popcorn-devouring HondaVAC is in for a treat when it discovers and eats up lost Orville pieces!

Taco Bell minced no words with this Tweet:

@Honda Your vacuum cleaner sucks. No, really.

Ha! What’s especially great about the Taco Bell Tweet is that fans of both brands piled on. One even kept score as to which brand had the more stinging Tweets. Check out that thread here. It’s well worth the read.

When there’s no time to calculate, we see the authentic brand
When Oreo did its now-famous “You can still dunk in the dark” Tweet during the blackout of the Superbowl, we immediately saw Oreo as more than a cookie, but a personality (a personality that apparently watches football and is pretty tapped into culture for a cookie). That’s the intrinsic value of that particular effort: we like Oreo more for doing it.

But because so few brands are doing such realtime creative, the story about that Tweet was everywhere. And that’s the secondary benefit of Brand Improv, PR value.

Is your brand ready for improv?
This new genre of improvisational advertising is exciting to me as a marketer. It’s the opposite of Apple's AAPL -1.27% “1984,” a carefully considered, well produced, epic piece of communication, but is no less powerful. And the improvisational nature of it will require completely different talent. Agencies might consider looking for improv comedians to helm this new “department” – it’s that different. Heck, new agencies are springing up like Relevant24 designed to do nothing but realtime creative.

But, more important than the talent, to act as naturally as Oreo or Honda or Taco Bell have in social media requires a deep understanding of one’s brand (in order to represent that brand live), a culture of experimentation, and a tolerance for failure. No improv comedian hits the mark every time, and neither will brands. You have to be ok with that reality.

I believe it’s a risk worth taking because the fails will wither on the social vine while the successes will be remembered. And who knows where it will go from here? Maybe other brands will coordinate social media verbal challenges to each other to equal effect. I hope so. It’s just plain fun to watch brands “talk” to each other like this.

So, is your brand ready for a little Brand Improv?

Source;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/willburns/2013/10/03/new-honda-campaign-spurs-brand-improv/