TOYOTA | BACKSEAT DRIVER | 2012
Handing the Steering Wheel to the Kid in the Backseat / TOYOTA "BACKSEAT DRIVER"
A kid in the backseat who used to just whine "are we there yet?" now grips their own steering wheel inside an iPhone app that's linked by GPS to the real car. Boring travel time spent just tracing a parent's driving got turned into a whole game.
The problem
Toyota's North American sales division had a problem: young people were losing interest in cars, and the company needed a new way to connect with kids, the drivers of the future. So they teamed up with PARTY, a creative lab with offices in Tokyo and New York, to launch a new brand aimed at children called "ToyToyota."
The insight
The starting point for this project was simple: if you want people to love a brand, start as young as possible. The team saw an opening in the backseat—not the passenger seat, not the driver's seat, but the place where kids have the least to do. They decided that getting kids to fall in love with driving itself would work better than any advertising words.
The idea
The first thing to come out of this was an iPhone app called "Backseat Driver." Using the iPhone's GPS function, it let kids drive their own car on screen in sync with the movement of the real car they were riding in. It linked to Foursquare data so kids could collect real nearby shops and landmarks, earn points to customize their car, and even share their drive records on Twitter. The whole system was built so that real-world movement and on-screen driving lined up perfectly.
What happened
The campaign won Gold in the Mobile category at the 2012 Cannes Lions. It also picked up a Silver Pencil at the One Show, earning recognition internationally.
Afterthought
Solving a kid's "I'm bored" with actual engineering is such a healthy idea. This isn't an ad to sell cars—it's an ad to make people love cars. It looks like a roundabout approach, but I think it might actually be the strongest kind of roundabout there is.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2012
