/ 28 February 2006

How ads created Honda revival

When Honda met Wieden + Kennedy, it was hardly an award-winning start. ”We are the Nike of the car industry,” Honda United Kingdom announced, amazing the London office of the independent United States advertising agency with a comparison to its legendary client.

Nike was at the forefront of technical innovation in its field, with a strong corporate credo, knockout marketing and an ultra-cool image; the perception of Honda in Britain could not have been more different.

”I knew nothing about them and didn’t want to,” says Wieden + Kennedy creative director Tony David-son. ”I thought ‘we are not going to work on that piece of business’ when they said the ‘power of dreams’ was the mandated endline. The power of dreams sounded like ‘the ride of your life’.”

Honda cars were well engineered, reliable and dull. Back in 2001, all of Britain thought so; the advertising said so. ”They built sensible cars for people heading for retirement,” says Kim Papworth, Davidson’s fellow creative director. ”I think we are now in a much different place.”

In an era beset by a profoundly uncertain mood, the confident partnership has produced some of the most memorable advertising of the decade, from a tiny cog starting off a chain reaction of 85 car parts to unveil the Honda Accord, to animated animals, a folk song and the idea of positive hate to sell a diesel engine. The first advert, Cog, was filmed in two long takes and caused a worldwide sensation in 2003. Such was the buzz, it led to the unprece-dented event of CNN International showing the full two minutes in a news story. The second advert, Grrr, won the top award, the film grand prix at the Cannes International advertising festival last year.

Although some in the industry see the latest work, Choir, in which a singing group perform all the sounds of the new Honda Civic, as off the boil, this is the most crucial advert of the entire Honda series.

Back in 2001 things were so bad for Honda that when it advertised, Toyota sales rose. Papworth and Davidson, sitting in a room in a basement room at Wieden + Kennedy covered in white squares full of scribbled ideas and stuck-on yellow notes, say the secret of the success of the past five years seems to have involved a large amount of trust.

The duo had a lot in common with their agency, which Davidson describes as follows: ”meet [founder] Dan Wieden and you kind of get why it’s a fucked-up, back-to-front, independent, chaotic, talented, mixed-up but lovely place”.

At the start, Wieden + Kennedy told the car company to take a deep breath and not focus advertising on its products for three years. It had to advertise itself. Honda agreed. It could afford to take a long-term view because a towering event was looming. The new Civic was coming in 2006, was aimed at the European market, and was built in Swindon. It had to be a success.

And with the release of the Choir advert, marketing efforts have reached a crescendo. The success of the car is of paramount importance to the company.

So have the ads worked? Sales of new Honda cars rose 47% in the UK from 66 981 units in 2002, before Wieden + Kennedy’s first major TV advertising campaign appeared, to 98 500 in 2005. At the same time, the money Honda spent on advertising space fell 37,5%, from £25,7-million to £13-million. The Honda Civic is the second best-selling car in its class, behind the Ford Focus.

Papworth and Davidson have been at the heart of the Honda/Wieden + Kennedy marriage from the beginning, supervising creative staff, tweaking ideas, suggesting outlandish proposals readily accepted by their client. If Wieden + Kennedy did not get Honda then, they do now. ”When you go to Japan and meet some of the people that worked with [Honda founder Soichiro Honda], it’s bleeding from them,” says Davidson. ”It’s fantastic. It’s like Honda oil dripping — it’s just wonderful. You can see him in them, and his passion.”

But their success is owing to translating Honda’s peculiar brand of reverent corporate fundamentalism to a wider British audience for whom it is of passing interest. Soichiro Honda once admitted to seeing a model-T Ford leaking oil when he was eight years old. ”I got down on my hands and knees to smell it,” Honda said. ”It was like perfume.” Wieden + Kennedy slapped the quote into a print advert alongside a bottle of perfume labelled Honda.

They paint a picture of a very accommodating client interested in advertising innovation, willing to run two-minute adverts against industry wisdom that they are not on air often enough to lodge in the minds of audiences. But as Papworth says: ”Show someone something really interesting twice and you have got them.”

To pitch Grrr, the agency went in with a guitar and sang the song to Honda UK marketing director Simon Thompson, who wanted the song recorded as performed. At the triumphant first screening of the ad last year, he thanked the agency for producing exactly what they said they were going to.

Thompson is leaving the company, and just how his imminent departure will affect the partnership has yet to be seen. But both Papworth and Davidson believe that in the new media age, there is a role for the traditional TV advert — but only if it is brilliant. ”With the media platforms changing and so much stuff coming at you from all angles, we had to do something different and something true,” says Davidson.

The statistics seem to bear this out. Last week 804 000 people downloaded Choir from Honda’s UK website. How many then e-mailed it to their friends is unrecorded, but Honda seems to have proved that if the advert is distinctive enough it can survive both PVR fast-forwarding and the rise of Internet advertising. The Internet was said to be causing the death of the TV advert. It might just herald its renaissance. — Â