History Repeats Itself.

This week I took a look at GQ April 2012 issue (the “special issue”). In it, there are tons and tons of advertisements and things that men need in the year 2012. When looking through the magazine, I found something really different. I came across a 1 page spread advertisement for Scion IQ. I never actually saw the car myself, but from the looks of it, it looks tiny. I guess through their research to find a way to campaign their vehicle, I think this question came up. Because the car is so small, doesn’t it seem like if you get into an accident once, you might get killed? I think that’s why they created this campaign for their airbags. If you see the spread, you can see that the car features 11 airbags.

So on the left side, you see that they have the creative copy of “I got your back, your front, your left, and your right”. I thought this was really creative because they are providing the safety feature in the car by showing that even though it’s a small car, it still provides the safety as any other cars on the market. But, I read the really small print on the bottom and saw that not all models of the IQ come with 11 airbags. They are campaigning that the car will provide you safety but only if you buy the upgraded model. Besides that, I thought it was a really creative campaign.

It kind of reminded me of the beetle Volkswagen campaign that we’ve all seen before. Because this car is so small, they chose to use the white space to their advantage by creative balance and harmony throughout the page. The tagline was kind of confusing though, it says “ the new scion IQ, IQ therefore I am”. I don’t really know exactly what that means but I think they can change the tagline. All in all, I thought the art directing was right on the dot.