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Grrr (advert)
Encyclopedia
Grrr is a 2004 advertising campaign
launched by Honda
to promote its newly launched i-CTDi diesel engine
s in the United Kingdom
. The campaign, which centred around a 90-second television and cinema advert, also comprised newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio commercial
s, free distributed merchandise, and an internet presence
which included an online game
, e-mail
advertising, and an interactive website. The campaign was created and managed by the advertising agency
Wieden+Kennedy
(W+K). W+K were given a budget of £600,000 for production of the television commercial, a process which lasted six months. The piece was directed by Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith, produced by London
-based production company
Nexus Productions
, and featured American author Garrison Keillor
singing the campaign's theme song
. Grrr premiered on British cinema screens on September 24, 2004.
Grrr was both a critical and financial success. It was the most-awarded campaign of 2005, sweeping awards ceremonies within the television and advertising industries, including the year's Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
, from which it took home the Film Grand Prix—considered the most prestigious honour in the advertising industry. The campaign proved popular with the British public, and Honda reported that its brand awareness figures more than doubled in the period following the campaign's debut. Overall sales of Honda products within the UK increased by more than 35%, and sales of diesel-engine Accords
shot from 518 units in 2003 to 21,766 units in 2004. Adweek
magazine picked the ad as the overall commercial of the decade in 2009.
bushes spelling out the word "Hate" in the background. Garrison Keiller, backed by a guitar
, introduces the piece, stating "Here's a little song for anyone who's ever hated, in the key of Grrr". As Keillor launches into the main portion of the commercial's song, a noisy and primitive-looking diesel engine flies into view. The inhabitants of the cartoon world negatively react to the engine's intrusion, with flowers coughing and closing up, a frog abandoning its lily leaf and chickens squawking. Keillor's singing is joined by a group whistling the tune as a further flock of flying diesel engines join the original and continue across the landscape, gradually being picked off by a variety of cartoon animals and by the landscape itself. A brief sequence of psychedelic patterns
cuts in, espousing the piece's theme of "Hate something, change something", before the view returns to the destruction of the last remaining noisy diesel engine. The second half of the commercial begins, with a double line of flamingo
s introducing a new, quieter, diesel engine. Accompanied by a flight of songbird
s, the shining engine floats above the scenery, the cartoon creatures below celebrating its arrival. The new engine finally flies over a flower display arranged as a logo and the words "Diesel i-CTDi", before cutting to a white background emblazoned with the Honda logo and the campaign's tagline, "The Power of Dreams".
ese automotive company
(behind Toyota). The concept, which built on the company's Japanese slogan, "Yume No Chikara" ("See one's dreams"), was proposed with an eye to making it "omnipresent" in the public eye. To this end, the first pieces of the campaign using the "Power of Dreams" slogan, which featured the Honda ASIMO
robot, comprised appearances in television, direct mail, radio, posters, magazines, newspapers, interactive television, cinema, motor shows, dealerships, postcards, beer mats, traffic cones, and numerous other media.
Following the initial burst of ASIMO-based spots, W+K released several "dream-based" campaigns for various Honda products, including Pecking Order, Seats, and Bus Lane. By far the most successful piece prior to the launch of Grrr was Cog
, a 60-second television and cinema commercial for the Honda Accord, which premiered in 2003. Cog, which followed a Rube Goldberg machine
constructed from pieces taken from a disassembled Accord, was a resounding success both critically and financially, garnering over 37 awards from the television and advertising industries. Between the campaign's debut and the launch of Grrr, sales of Honda automobiles within Europe increased from 170,000 to 217,000 units per year, and worldwide sales showed similar gains.
working for W+K. Once the tune was composed, a set of rough storyboard
s was assembled and pitched to Honda accompanied by the trio on guitars. After the client greenlit the project, the team began searching for a film director
. Of the applications for the position, that of Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith, an animation team known for their previous work on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
and the BBC
animated sketch show Monkey Dust
was approved, and the pair hired. Their submission included a animation cel of a group of fish jumping out of water to swallow flying diesel engines. Michael Russoff said of the pair's submission "It was a world you wanted to see more of. It was like a golf course
designed by Liberace
."
Advertising campaign
An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages that share a single idea and theme which make up an integrated marketing communication...
launched by Honda
Honda
is a Japanese public multinational corporation primarily known as a manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles.Honda has been the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer since 1959, as well as the world's largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines measured by volume, producing more than...
to promote its newly launched i-CTDi diesel engine
Diesel engine
A diesel engine is an internal combustion engine that uses the heat of compression to initiate ignition to burn the fuel, which is injected into the combustion chamber...
s in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. The campaign, which centred around a 90-second television and cinema advert, also comprised newspaper and magazine advertisements, radio commercial
Radio commercial
Commercial radio stations make most of their revenue selling “airtime” to advertisers. Of total media expenditures, radio accounts for 6.9%. Radio advertisements or “spots” are available when a business or service provides valuable consideration, usually cash, in exchange for the station airing...
s, free distributed merchandise, and an internet presence
Online advertising
Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web to deliver marketing messages to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, blogs, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, interstitial...
which included an online game
Online game
An online game is a game played over some form of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology, but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems...
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
advertising, and an interactive website. The campaign was created and managed by the advertising agency
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
Wieden+Kennedy
Wieden+Kennedy
Wieden+Kennedy is an independently owned American advertising agency best known for its work for Nike...
(W+K). W+K were given a budget of £600,000 for production of the television commercial, a process which lasted six months. The piece was directed by Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith, produced by London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
-based production company
Production company
A production company provides the physical basis for works in the realms of the performing arts, new media art, film, television, radio, and video.- Tasks and functions :...
Nexus Productions
Nexus Productions
Nexus Productions is an animation and film production company founded in 1997 by Charlotte Bavasso and Chris O'Reilly.Nexus productions have won awards for various works...
, and featured American author Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor
Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio...
singing the campaign's theme song
Theme music
Theme music is a piece that is often written specifically for a radio program, television program, video game or movie, and usually played during the title sequence and/or end credits...
. Grrr premiered on British cinema screens on September 24, 2004.
Grrr was both a critical and financial success. It was the most-awarded campaign of 2005, sweeping awards ceremonies within the television and advertising industries, including the year's Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is a global event for those working in advertising and related fields. The seven-day festival, incorporating the awarding of the Lions awards, is held yearly at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès in Cannes, France...
, from which it took home the Film Grand Prix—considered the most prestigious honour in the advertising industry. The campaign proved popular with the British public, and Honda reported that its brand awareness figures more than doubled in the period following the campaign's debut. Overall sales of Honda products within the UK increased by more than 35%, and sales of diesel-engine Accords
Honda Accord
The Honda Accord is a series of compact, mid-size and full-size automobiles manufactured by Honda since 1976, and sold in a majority of automotive markets throughout the world....
shot from 518 units in 2003 to 21,766 units in 2004. Adweek
Adweek
Adweek is a weekly American advertising trade publication that was first published in 1978....
magazine picked the ad as the overall commercial of the decade in 2009.
Sequence
Grrr opens with a shot of an animated landscape of grassy hills and blue lakes, with topiaryTopiary
Topiary is the horticultural practice of training live perennial plants, by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees, shrubs and subshrubs to develop and maintain clearly defined shapes, perhaps geometric or fanciful; and the term also refers to plants which have been shaped in this way. It can be...
bushes spelling out the word "Hate" in the background. Garrison Keiller, backed by a guitar
Guitar
The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...
, introduces the piece, stating "Here's a little song for anyone who's ever hated, in the key of Grrr". As Keillor launches into the main portion of the commercial's song, a noisy and primitive-looking diesel engine flies into view. The inhabitants of the cartoon world negatively react to the engine's intrusion, with flowers coughing and closing up, a frog abandoning its lily leaf and chickens squawking. Keillor's singing is joined by a group whistling the tune as a further flock of flying diesel engines join the original and continue across the landscape, gradually being picked off by a variety of cartoon animals and by the landscape itself. A brief sequence of psychedelic patterns
Psychedelic art
Psychedelic art is any kind of visual artwork inspired by psychedelic experiences induced by drugs such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. The word "psychedelic" "mind manifesting". By that definition all artistic efforts to depict the inner world of the psyche may be considered "psychedelic"...
cuts in, espousing the piece's theme of "Hate something, change something", before the view returns to the destruction of the last remaining noisy diesel engine. The second half of the commercial begins, with a double line of flamingo
Flamingo
Flamingos or flamingoes are gregarious wading birds in the genus Phoenicopterus , the only genus in the family Phoenicopteridae...
s introducing a new, quieter, diesel engine. Accompanied by a flight of songbird
Songbird
A songbird is a bird belonging to the suborder Passeri of the perching birds . Another name that is sometimes seen as scientific or vernacular name is Oscines, from Latin oscen, "a songbird"...
s, the shining engine floats above the scenery, the cartoon creatures below celebrating its arrival. The new engine finally flies over a flower display arranged as a logo and the words "Diesel i-CTDi", before cutting to a white background emblazoned with the Honda logo and the campaign's tagline, "The Power of Dreams".
Background
The "Power of Dreams" campaign, of which Grrr is a part, began in 2002. W+K, who pitched the concept, envisioned the "Power of Dreams" becoming a worldwide promotion tool for the Honda brand. Sales of Honda products within Europe had been in decline since 1998 under the previous campaign ("Do You Have a Honda?"), and Nissan had taken its position as the number two JapanJapan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese automotive company
Automotive industry
The automotive industry designs, develops, manufactures, markets, and sells motor vehicles, and is one of the world's most important economic sectors by revenue....
(behind Toyota). The concept, which built on the company's Japanese slogan, "Yume No Chikara" ("See one's dreams"), was proposed with an eye to making it "omnipresent" in the public eye. To this end, the first pieces of the campaign using the "Power of Dreams" slogan, which featured the Honda ASIMO
ASIMO
is a humanoid robot created by Honda. Introduced in 2000, ASIMO, which is an acronym for "Advanced Step in Innovative MObility", was created to be a helper to people. With aspirations of helping people who lack full mobility, ASIMO is used to encourage young people to study science and mathematics...
robot, comprised appearances in television, direct mail, radio, posters, magazines, newspapers, interactive television, cinema, motor shows, dealerships, postcards, beer mats, traffic cones, and numerous other media.
Following the initial burst of ASIMO-based spots, W+K released several "dream-based" campaigns for various Honda products, including Pecking Order, Seats, and Bus Lane. By far the most successful piece prior to the launch of Grrr was Cog
Cog (television commercial)
"Cog" is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Honda in 2003 to promote the seventh-generation Accord line of cars. It follows a chain of colliding parts taken from a disassembled Accord. Wieden+Kennedy developed a GB£6 million marketing campaign around "Cog" and its...
, a 60-second television and cinema commercial for the Honda Accord, which premiered in 2003. Cog, which followed a Rube Goldberg machine
Rube Goldberg machine
A Rube Goldberg machine, contraption, device, or apparatus is a deliberately over-engineered or overdone machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction...
constructed from pieces taken from a disassembled Accord, was a resounding success both critically and financially, garnering over 37 awards from the television and advertising industries. Between the campaign's debut and the launch of Grrr, sales of Honda automobiles within Europe increased from 170,000 to 217,000 units per year, and worldwide sales showed similar gains.
Production
The concept behind Grrr arose from an anecdote about Honda's chief engine designer, Kenichi Nagahiro. Nagahiro detested the noise, smell, and appearance of diesel engines, and when asked to design the company's first diesel engine, he flatly refused unless he was allowed to start completely from scratch. This motivation of "positive hate" was translated into a song by Michael Russoff, Sean Thompson and Michael Russell, a team of copywritersCopywriting
Copywriting is the use of words and ideas to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Although the word copy may be applied to any content intended for printing , the term copywriter is generally limited to promotional situations, regardless of the medium...
working for W+K. Once the tune was composed, a set of rough storyboard
Storyboard
Storyboards are graphic organizers in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence....
s was assembled and pitched to Honda accompanied by the trio on guitars. After the client greenlit the project, the team began searching for a film director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
. Of the applications for the position, that of Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith, an animation team known for their previous work on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events is a 2004 black comedy film directed by Brad Silberling. It is an adaptation of the The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window, being the first three books in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket...
and the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
animated sketch show Monkey Dust
Monkey Dust
Monkey Dust is a British satirical cartoon, notorious for its dark humour and handling of taboo topics such as murder, suicide and paedophilia. There were three series broadcast on BBC Three between 2003 and 2005...
was approved, and the pair hired. Their submission included a animation cel of a group of fish jumping out of water to swallow flying diesel engines. Michael Russoff said of the pair's submission "It was a world you wanted to see more of. It was like a golf course
Golf course
A golf course comprises a series of holes, each consisting of a teeing ground, fairway, rough and other hazards, and a green with a flagstick and cup, all designed for the game of golf. A standard round of golf consists of playing 18 holes, thus most golf courses have this number of holes...
designed by Liberace
Liberace
Wladziu Valentino Liberace , best known simply as Liberace, was a famous American pianist and vocalist.In a career that spanned four decades of concerts, recordings, motion pictures, television and endorsements, Liberace became world-renowned...
."
External links
- Online Grrr game at Unit9.com