TOYOTA PRIUS | PRIUS GOES PLURAL | 2011
They Made You Vote on Grammar Before You Could Buy the Car / TOYOTA PRIUS "PRIUS GOES PLURAL"
If there are more Priuses on the road, what do you call them? That question alone became an entire campaign. The answer wasn't found in the car—it was found in grammar.
The problem
In 2011, at the Detroit Auto Show, the Prius expanded from a single model into a family of four. Among multiple Prius owners, a simple question had been debated for years: what do you call it when there's more than one?
The insight
Instead of handing out an answer, the core of this campaign was to throw out the question and let the public decide. Saatchi & Saatchi LA noticed the grammatical oddity of the word "Prius" itself and set it to the format of a 1970s-style educational cartoon. By turning irregular plurals like goose/geese and cactus/cacti into a song, they transformed the question "what's the plural of Prius?" into fun content in its own right.
The idea
The stop-motion animation, produced by Hunter Gatherer, mimicked a 1970s educational show in the style of Schoolhouse Rock. Set to music, it walked through the quirks of English plurals before asking: "So what do you call more than one Prius?" People could vote through banner ads, Facebook, the Toyota website, and even a polling booth inside the social game Car Town. Later, a series of skits had James Lipton asking the question "What's the plural of Prius?" to figures including "Shakespeare," a champion spelling-bee girl, and even an octopus.
What happened
The vote came down in favor of "Prii," which won 25% of the vote and became the official plural—one that even made it into Dictionary.com. The campaign won a Gold Lion in the Cyber category at Cannes Lions in 2011, along with the People's Choice award for Best Copywriting at the Webby Awards and recognition in the Copywriting category at D&AD.
Afterthought
What makes this campaign so delightfully funny is that it got people talking not through specs or design, but purely through what to call the thing. Turning a grammar nerd's dilemma into a nationwide vote—I'm a total sucker for ideas like that.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2011
