page_title: Cog (advertisement)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Cog (advertisement) / Production / Background
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Honda Accord, 7. Generation
context_page_description: "Cog" is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Honda in 2003 to promote the seventh-generation Accord line of cars. It follows the convention of a Rube Goldberg machine, utilizing a chain of colliding parts taken from a disassembled Accord. Wieden+Kennedy developed a GB£6 million marketing campaign around "Cog" and its partner pieces, "Sense" and "Everyday", broadcast later in the year. The piece itself was produced on a budget of £1 million by Partizan Midi-Minuit. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet directed the seven-month production, contracting The Mill to handle post-production. The 120-second final cut of "Cog" was broadcast on British television on 6 April 2003, during a commercial break in ITV's coverage of the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix.
  The campaign was very successful both critically and financially. Honda's UK domain saw more web traffic in the 24 hours after "Cog"'s television début than all but one UK automotive brand received during that entire month.
context_section_description: Sales of Honda products within Europe had been in decline since 1998, and the company's position as the number two Japanese automotive company, behind Toyota, had been taken by Nissan. European consumers perceived the brand as staid and uninspiring; and the cars to be of lesser quality than those produced by European manufacturers. In one survey, one quarter of respondents "wouldn't dream of buying a Honda as their next car". It was in this climate in 2001 that advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy proposed to Honda a new advertising strategy based on the company's Japanese motto, "Yume No Chikara" ("Power of Dreams"). The stated goal of the campaign was to increase Honda's share of the UK market to five percent within three years and to change the public image of the brand from "dull but functional" to "warm and consumer-friendly", all on a lower marketing budget than its predecessor agency had demanded.
  The first series of promotions in the United Kingdom adopted the strapline "What if...?", and explored various "dream-like" scenarios. The first television campaign explicitly introduced the premise of the campaign by asking what would happen if the world's favourite word (Okay) was replaced with "What if?". The next few pieces of the campaign, "Pecking Order", "Seats", and "Bus Lane" for television and "Doodle", "Big Grin", and "Oblonger" for radio, became progressively more surreal, and featured oddities ranging from a traffic cone draped in leopard fur to trees growing traffic lights from their branches. In 2002, Matt Gooden, a creative director, and Ben Walker, a copywriter, proposed a new television and cinema advertisement to promote the seventh-generation Honda Accord line that had recently been rolled out in Europe and Japan. The advertisement, based on a complex chain reaction of moving parts from the Accord itself, was approved and given the working title "Cog".
caption: "Cog" was released to promote the seventh-generation Honda Accord.
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