Honda’s leap of faith challenges TV advertising

May 30th, 2008 by Wendy McAuliffe

For those of you who missed it, last night at 8:10pm Honda and Channel 4 staged the ‘first’ ever live advert on British television. Whether it really was a first is debatable - I’ve heard reports to the contrary - but nevertheless it was a brave attempt to turn TV advertising on its head by promoting relevance and engagement, and was very successful.

The commercial, which is part of Honda’s ‘Difficult is worth doing’ campaign, featured 19 skydivers who had three minutes and 20 seconds to spell out the word H.o.n.d.a during freefall, before deploying their chutes. A replay can be watched here (suprisingly it has not yet been uploaded to the Honda YouTube channel).

The stunt was a teaser to Honda’s Accord new multi-million pound ad campaign, which airs on 1 June - the production of which has been documented on the ‘Difficult is worth doing’ blog, designed by Collective.

Overall, the ad seems to have been very well received. A Tweet Scan reveals a very positive reaction, with words such as “awesome”, “incredible” and “cool” cropping up a lot.

I was suprised by the limited amount of Honda branding - I’ve seen several reports questioning why there was so little, and I have to admit had I not read about it on the MediaGuardian website in the morning, I might have been a bit confused until the end.

However, setting minor criticism aside, the campaign is a big step towards TV and online ad campaigns being better integrated. With the fast-paced, time-shift culture that we live in today, TV advertisers are going to have to work harder to keep audiences engaged. Could live TV advertising be the answer? It’s not the only solution, and obviously demands big budgets…bit it will be interesting to see the conversion rates this Honda campaign produces.

 

 Honda live TV ad: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

      

Tags: , advertising, channel 4, honda, live ad, tv

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