This morning at the AHAA convention, they did a program on Conill’s online campaign for the Toyota Yaris. They did a lot of interesting things in that campaign, including some good cutting edge stuff with avatars and a Second Life-esque world where people could go and do all kinds of cool stuff, like create music and, of course, check out the Yaris.
Working in multicultural advertising can be frustrating at times because it tends to lag the general market in sophistication and, more importantly, daring. I can understand that because it involves two degrees of risk-taking for the client: first they have to be convinced to take the risk to do multicultural advertising, and then to get them to do something cutting edge in technology or online goes is just another step of risk-taking for the client. From the presentation, it seemed that Toyota was able to get comfortable with doing something targeting just the Hispanic market and to use some pretty cool, edgy tools to do that. Good for them, it’s refreshing to see a marketer really open it up and go for it. Multicultural agencies are attracting as good of talent as the general market agencies these days, so it’s just a matter of getting clients to let them do what they can do.
Apparently a lot of the campaign was conducted in partnership with Nochelatina.com, a website we’ve gotten to work with in the past. Almost every slide in the presentation mentioned NL or showed their logo somewhere. I don’t know if Alex and the folks at NL were behind that, but they got a ton of free publicity in front of the media buyers and planners at most of the leading Hispanic ad agencies. That’s good work if you can get it.