Honda Accord: "Тізбектейтін Бөлшектер"

British television and cinema advertisement launched by Honda in 2003

"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 £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" television début than all but one UK automotive brand received during that entire month. The branded content attached to "Cog" through interactive television was accessed by more than 250,000 people, and 10,000 people followed up with a request for a brochure for the Honda Accord or a DVD copy of the advertisement. The media reaction to the advertisement was equally effusive; The Independent Peter York described it as creating "the water cooler ad conversation of the year", while Quentin Letts of The Daily Telegraph believed it was "certain to become an advertising legend". and influential commercials of the 2000s, and received more awards from the television and advertising industries than any commercial in history. Its success was blighted, however, by persistent accusations of plagiarism by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the creators of The Way Things Go (1987).

"Cog" opens with a close up on a transmission bearing rolling down a board into a synchro hub. The hub in turn rolls into a gear wheel cog, which falls off the board and into a camshaft and pulley wheel. The camera tracks slowly from left to right, following the domino chain of reactions across an otherwise empty gallery space. The complexity of the interactions increases as the commercial progresses, growing from simple collisions to ziplines made from a bonnet release cable, scales and see saws constructed from multiple carefully balanced parts, and a swinging mobile of suspended glass windows. Later sequences begin to make use of the Accord's electronic systems; the automated water sensors attached to the windscreen are used to make wiper blades start crawling across the floor, and a side door with a door mirror indicator lowers the automated window to let a part pass through. The majority of "Cog" takes place in complete silence, the only sounds coming from the collisions of the pieces themselves. This is broken with the activation of the CD player from the Accord, which begins playing The Sugarhill Gang's 1979 single "Rapper's Delight". The sequence ends when the button of an electronic key fob is pressed, closing the hatchback of a fully assembled Honda Accord Wagon on a carefully balanced trailer. The car rolls off the trailer, and stops in front of a tonneau cover bearing the "Accord" marque, while narrator Garrison Keillor asks "Isn't it nice when things just work?". The screen fades to white and the piece closes on the Honda logo and the brand's motto, "The Power of Dreams".

Honda's share of the European automotive market 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. was approved and given the working title "Cog".

Gooden and Walker had been working together since 1988. By 2002, their portfolio included a Guinness World Record holding one second advertisement produced for Leo Burnett Worldwide, and a depression awareness booklet for the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust. Wieden+Kennedy approached Honda with a rough, low budget 30 second trial film, inspired by the children's board game Mouse Trap, Caractacus Potts' breakfast making machine in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and a 1987 Swiss art film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go). "Cog" was approved with a budget of £1 million, and Gooden & Walker recruited a London based team to go through the logistics of the shoot in detail. Approval for the script took another month. Honda insisted that several specific Accord features, such as a door with a wing mirror indicator and a rain sensitive windscreen, appear in the final cut. The company planned to highlight these features in sales brochures. Antoine Bardou Jacquet was hired to direct the piece.

Bardou Jacquet wanted to compose the advertisement with as little computer generated imagery as possible, believing that the final product would be that much more appealing to its audience. To this end, he set two months aside for the creation of hundreds of conceptual drawings detailing various possible interactions between the parts, and a further four months for practical testing and development. Four days of filming were required to get these two shots, two days for each minute long section. Between testing and filming, it took approximately 100 takes to film the commercial. (Rumors about 606 takes were later debunked.) The team commandeered two of Honda's six hand assembled Accords—one to roll off the trailer at the end of the advertisement, the other to be stripped for parts. from The Mill, spent a lot of time on set during filming, where he advised the film crew on whether particular sections could be accomplished more easily by re filming or by manipulating the image afterwards. Even so, the constant movement of the components on camera made it difficult to achieve a seamless transition between the two 60 second shots. Several sections also required minor video editing, such as re centering the frame to stay closer to the action, removal of wires, highlighting a spray of water, and adjusting the pace for dramatic purposes. and tabloid papers such as The Sun and The Daily Mirror. These shortened versions made use of newly introduced interactive options on the Sky Digital television network. Viewers were encouraged to press a button on their remote control, bringing up a menu that allowed the viewer to see the full 120 second version of the advertisement. Other menu options included placing an order for a free documentary DVD and a brochure for the Honda Accord. The DVD, which was also included as an insert in 1.2 million newspapers in the first week of the commercial's rollout, contained a "making of" documentary featuring interviews and behind the scenes footage of the production process, a virtual tour of the Accord, the original music video to "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, and an illustrated guide to all the parts shown in "Cog". The interactive 30 second versions of "Cog" proved hugely successful. More than 250,000 people used the menu option, spending an average of two and a half minutes in the dedicated advertising area. A significant number watched the looped 120 second version for up to ten minutes. Of those who opened the menu, 10,000 requested either a DVD or a brochure, and Honda used the data collected from the interactive option to arrange a number of test drives. Expansion of the "Cog" campaign to a worldwide market was fraught with a number of logistical difficulties. The cost of airing a 120 second commercial proved prohibitive in most markets. Traffic to Honda websites quadrupled; in the first few weeks, "Cog" was downloaded by over a million people. By mid May, the number was twice that. It has been estimated that more people in the United States voluntarily chose to watch "Cog" than any other Honda commercial. In financial terms, "Cog" was an unprecedented success for Honda. The £32,000 spent on placements on the BSkyB network alone achieved a greater response than a previous £1 million direct mailing campaign. Sales of Honda vehicles in the United Kingdom jumped by 28 percent, despite lower marketing and public relations spending by the company and an increase in prices relative to competitors' vehicles. Visits to Honda dealerships rose from an average of 3,500 to 3,700 per month, with 22 percent of these resulting in the purchase of a Honda, compared to 19 percent before the campaign.