Humor

Sienna Minivan Video Taps Your Inner Rapper

By Delphine Hirasuna | March 18, 2011September 4, 2014

Few things say that you spend most of your time driving kids to soccer games and making cupcakes for bake sales than being seen behind the wheel of a minivan. It fairly shouts that you have a house in the suburbs with a square patch of lawn in front and a kid’s swing set in the backyard, and are more likely to spend weekends at a petting zoo than at a trendy art opening. Parenting is cool, but it isn’t COOL like Kanye West, hip-hop, rapper cool, if you know what I mean. This funny video ad tackles this stigma head-on by having a middle-class, middle-aged couple rap proudly about making jell-o molds, changing diapers and owning a Toyota Sienna Minivan, which they refer to as their “Swagger Wagon.” Created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the video has gone viral and spawned a whole series of new Swagger Wagon commercials.

Advertising

Man, Cars, Nature in “Harmony”

By Delphine Hirasuna | August 10, 2009September 4, 2014

Man, nature and machine have been brought together in the new “Harmony” advertising campaign for the third-generation Prius hybrid. Your eyes are not deceiving you if you think the landscape is alive with people. It is. Two hundred costumed extras were filmed and then computer cloned to create a surreal landscape made to look like over a million people. Evocative of photographer Ann Geddes’s pictures of babies fancifully dressed like fairies, flowers and bunnies, the Prius cast was costumed to represent blades of grass, puffy clouds, flowers and leaves. Conceived by Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles, with Mike McKay as executive creative director, the Prius commercial was filmed in New Zealand. Hideaki Hosono –better known as Mr. Hide (pronounced hee-day) — represented by The Sweet Shop production company, directed the human sequences. Nine different nature costumes were designed for the shoot, with 150 people forming the grass and water, 22 people for the tree trunks, 20 for the stones, 30 for the leaves, 20 for the clouds, 10 for the sun, 8 for the flowers, 8 for the butterflies and 23 for the autumn leaves.