Honda

Here’s the latest campaign from Wieden + Kennedy, London for Honda featuring an impressive display of “problems” solved by the resourceful Honda engineering team. So far this whole campaign is now my favorite for the year. From their entertaining interactive site found at ProblemPlayground.com to everything that went into the making of the spot itself. This piece is part of a campaign to introduce their new zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell car called the FCX Clarity. In order to do so, they decided to give us a little insight into what type of team Honda uses to come up with these “problem solving” machines. The car itself isn’t the only testament to the engineering prowess of their team, as the people you see in the spot are all real-life members of Honda’s engineering squad. It begins by displaying someone attempting to solve a Rubix cube only to pan out to an entire team working to build an abstract block MADE of solved Rubix cubes…not only that but it’s made to resemble the engine they designed for the car. Inspired after completing this task the team scurries off to then try and solve various other “seemingly impossible” challenges to represent what these poor folks had to go through in order to accomplish what they’ve done. Watch it for yourself and you’ll see… agree with me or not, i don’t mind, but I think it is a perfect example of using the brand itself to sell its products, rather than some cheap marketing ploys designed to entice consumer desire. This seems to be a definite follow-up to their somewhat controversial Honda – Cog commercial that involved a group of their engineers and 606 takes (no cgi, no special effects, just a bunch of nerds with a passion for whatever projects they’re assigned to).

I rarely do this, but in this case feel it is almost my duty to shower my compliments to whomever was in charge of the Information Architecture/User Experience for the website. It’s fast loading, clean, links are easy to read/navigate, and best of all it enables you to download the spot as well as the making of the commercial in a variety of formats. No typical text links either… decently sized icons align themselves with each download option making it simple to find the version you desire (it even includes an iPod version). Navigating back to the home page was a snap, and although the website includes sound effects, there was no annoying music/ongoing sounds playing if I were to temporarily stop using the site. Nothing is more annoying than opening a site in your browser with the intention of going through it later, only to become thoroughly annoyed by some auto-loading music/sound that emerges from the minimized browser.
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