Toyota turns everyday New Zealand streets into its biggest ad /

Everywhere you look / Toyota found a way to use its ubiquity in the New Zealander market to grow brand salience. Rather than talking about specs and car features, the brand made a campaign that gets people to notice just how many of its cars there are already around them. It taps into the tendency that we have to spot something more often after we’ve started noticing it – the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon aka the frequency illusion.

It’s a tactic primed to boost mental availability, the extent to which a brand easily comes to mind in buying situations – one of the two pillars of brand building alongside physical availability according to the Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science.

Toyota isn’t the first brand wake up to the benefits of this strategy. Samsung’s Join the Flip Side campaign for its folding phone follows a similar approach: the ad’s protagonist in its ad starts noticing the fold that characterises the smartphone everywhere in the world around her.

Like Samsung, Toyota essentially turn unbranded everyday occurrences, like waiting at an intersection or in a car park, into prompts to think ‘Toyota’.

Quantity over depth / Choose quantity over depth. Here’s some advice you seldom read. Most of the time, we wouldn’t impart it either, except in this case, advertising many products in a single ad instead of drilling into one was exactly the right move.

While combining all your offering in one short video could dull the impact, Toyota leveraged its leadership presence to showcase its varied portfolio in a way that feels natural and compelling.

‘Showcasing every Toyota proof point in a single commercial could have easily turned into a manifesto-style ad, and we wanted to avoid this,’ said Steve Cochran, chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi NZ in a statement. ‘Striking upon the idea of instead having all these proof points coincidently at an intersection provided a far more engaging concept to explore.’

In the ad, Toyota shows its wider ecosystem, from car sharing to rentals, used vehicles and aftersales services, appealing to a wide audience with diverse transportation needs. It helps reframe Toyota as a comprehensive a mobility solutions provider that caters to all kinds of transportation preferences, rather than a mere carmaker.