Toyota RAV4 "Skip this Ad"
Channel: David A. Hays
Date: 2015-02-20

The RAV4 is a sport ‘activity’ vehicle for busy active people, so Toyota wanted a digital campaign that acknowledged this insight. In a transparent, self-aware approach, we cast an up-and-coming female comedian that would likely resonate with our active, female skewing demographic and made her the champion of avoiding typical time wasters online, like pre-roll ads and loading bars. Knowing this would be a digital campaign that utilized lots of video, we let the cameras roll and had a ton of fun with the improvisational comedic style in which we poked fun at online ads, cheesy voice-overs, gaudy graphic logo treatments, internet memes, and of course, cat videos. On YouTube, we even encouraged users to skip our video ads. However, if the user didn’t click the skip button, the ad would play for over ten minutes! On Hulu, we created 23 different pre-roll ads that not only cracked us up but also called out all the RAV4's new features. Rich media banners showed our funny-woman smashing spinning hourglasses and lassooing lagging loading bars, and a paired down website wasted no time in demonstrating all the important new features and none of the fluff.