Even for those of us who are neither TV nor football (American) fans, this year the Super Bowl had some real treats in store.
In the build up to the big game we came across the beautiful short films, One Bold Choice Leads to Another, honoring fathers through powerful human connections. They featured a range of athletes, from paraplegics to football stars, talking about how their dads had shaped them and encouraged them to make one bold choice in their lives. The series was produced by Toyota as part of its “Bold New Camry” campaign.
The first time I saw the Amy Purdy teaser film, it brought me to tears. The story itself was powerful — of Purdy’s dad giving life to his daughter “a second time” as she puts it. He donated his kidney to her, after she had gone into septic shock from a form of bacterial meningitis and had already lost both kidneys, her spleen, and both of her legs below the knee. After the operation, Purdy took up snowboarding and has become a paraplegic sensation. You may have seen her as a finalist on Dancing with the Stars.
When it comes to original content, Camry delivered strongly. Using our simple gut test – you barely got the feeling that something was being sold to you. Instead this story felt like a gift for the audience to enjoy. Camry didn’t talk about itself, largely abstained from product placement and didn’t show Purdy giving her dad a Camry to repay him for the transplant. The film mostly just let father and daughter talk about their experience. Then, in an aha moment in the final few frames, Camry revealed its brand. The online versions have the Toyota logo overlay in the screen corner from the beginning and the brand is in the titles, in what seems to be a result of marketing hesitation – when really they take away from the strength of an otherwise very powerful delivery.
Nonetheless, this was a master class in the art of video content marketing. All the teaser films were of the same quality (here’s another one), which naturally made me curious what Camry would do with its actual Super Bowl ad.
If you watched the game, you now know the answer. In the first ad after kickoff, Amy Purdy appeared on the screen, but instead of speaking with her dad in an intimate short film, the ad showed her running along a road, racing down a mountain, dancing in a ballroom, and proudly driving a Camry, all while Muhammad Ali reeled off his famous Rumble in the Jungle rant in the background.
It was a giant missed opportunity. To Camry’s credit, in the second half of the game it came back with a second ad more in the style of the pre-game teasers and thus more effective in connecting with the audience. But it begged the question of why the company had backed down from a powerful, intimate film that would have had people really talking, thinking, and most of all feeling. Leading with a film like that in a setting as big as the Super Bowl, now that would have been one bold choice.