Team One Advertising

The pictures above are of a hologram of a Lexus, which was designed by Team One and put up in ten cities, for two months, across the U.S. The whole premise behind the hologram was that people could use an outside touch screen to pick the color, change the body style, and even virtually drive the car. Making a hologram seems like a fairly original idea, but all of the interactions with it feel a little bit too reminiscent of shopping on CarMax; you can play with the color and see a 360 degree view of what the car looks like. The actual hologram is intriguing because it's a hologram, and how often do you see those? Not a lot. The activities that go along with "playing" with the hologram are recycled ideas of what car websites have been allowing shoppers to do online for years. This is one of the better creative works Team One has done for Lexus; quite a bit of the TV spots created are adequate or decent, at best. That's not to say there are not a few gems they created for Lexus because there are, with the operative word being few. What makes the really great spots stand out from the expected clutter of car advertising is that the great spots don't focus so intensely on facts, figures, or product features; the great spots find a way to let the car be showcased as the star of the ad, but not strictly because of what it can do, but rather what a Lexus means in the context of the buyer's life. We have seen this before with advertising for Bud Light and Walmart, in which a brand loses touch with consumers and previous users by straying from an emotional connection, and the end result is usually a decline in sales. Clearly, an emotive element serves the advertiser well, especially in a medium like TV, where people are not going to be as responsive to facts and stats.

Below is an example of what I have deemed a gem in Team One's advertising for Lexus:



The difference between the above spot and what is below is drastic. The spot below is not terrible, and all the little cars making one big picture is a popular concept; however, it is still not great advertising. It doesn't have the magical sensibility of the first ad, and it doesn't provide any source for connection with the viewer. After watching it a couple times, it has an almost militaristic feel. You can't see into the cars, so they look really mechanical, like there is not even a person driving.



I found it interesting that the tagline used in the above ad, "pursuit of perfection," is the same one used in advertising done by Dentsu for Lexus. The storybook ad Team One created was pretty good-much better than some of the other spots they did for Lexus- but when you watch the spot below done by Dentsu, it makes the Team One work look like copy cats who sort of missed the mark. This spot by Dentsu is a really great example of how an emotional connection in advertising, regardless of what product it is for, elevates and enhances the resonance of the ad.



Dentsu Canada for Lexus.