Aug
4
Toyota Hits Big Red Eject Button
Filed Under Advertising
After hitting the button, bystanders heard someone yelling “That was Easy!”
In all seriousness:
Toyota made (what could be) a huge announcement late last week that will have the trade rags talking for some time and, I’m sure, churn out lots of commentary from many folks.
The announcement basically outlined that, effective January 1, 2010 (5 months from now) they are moving all advertising in-house domestically (Japan) and creating a new “marketing assistance” company that will oversee global marketing.
It’s a little unclear whether this is creative/media or both. These days “mediums” drive some creativity so they can get pretty messy and blended.
It’s also a little unclear how much influence or control the “Global” company will have over the rest of the world and its advertising/media strategies and tactics.
I picked this up from Agency Spy where Kiran asserts that this means Saatchi will lose out big. The original release is here. I guess it remains to be seen what this actually means.
If indeed this is a full pull in house and involves both creative and media duties, this is a very big deal. Some companies, like Samsung, own their own creative agency. However they also use Starcom for all planning/buying….so it’s not quite as dramatic as this could be to Toyota’s agencies.
With Bob Lutz charging forward on new GM strategies with better and different creative and media use and now Toyota doing a bit of a left turn on their ad strategies, this could be big and traumatic for the ad business and many media properties if other auto cos. follow their example and step out from the norm.
Only time will tell I guess.
The most interesting piece in this article that I picked up on was that Toyota is doing this to get “closer to their customers”. By saying that, they are insinuating that the agency layer creates a “distancing” that doesn’t let Toyota listen to their own customers well enough. This is pretty interesting…if only in that Toyota could be really creating a big obstacle and reason for people to buy and stick with their products if only because they could be seen as one of the only car companies that actually LISTENS and converses.
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2 Responses to “Toyota Hits Big Red Eject Button”
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You mean Saatchi, yes?
Does this mean Digital Signage will also start to move to Japan? The car retail trade seems made for the medium.. but the Japanese have been unspectacular in their software efforts, so I would be surprised. Still, there’s little that a billion dollars can’t fix.
LOL – yes…sorry…thanks for the fix.
This is all advertising, not just DOOH. we’ve done DOOH in Canada with them but not yet in the US.