Honda Let it shine on Vimeo

BRAND OWNER:Honda
CATEGORY:Automotive
REGION:EMEA
DATE:Apr 2009 - Dec 2008
AGENCY:Wieden & Kennedy
MEDIA CHANNEL

With the launch of Honda’s Insight hybrid car, the automotive brand wanted to make a big impact without a huge environmental impact.
It created Let It Shine – a 60 second TV spot which at first looks like a huge LED screen, but you soon realise the animation is being created by hundreds of car headlights. A matrix of hundreds of car headlights was created and animated with each set of headlights acting as a pixel. The ad was a huge viral hit and Honda wanted to leverage this in an online environment. It teamed up with high definition video hosting site Vimeo to create an experience which went beyond the borders of the usual flash player box, taking the traditional page takeover to a new level. People who went to Vimeo to view the Honda ad can press play to see the video and the whole page around the video also transforms. Just as the ad shows action taking place over a whole night until sunrise, so the background of the page goes completely black, blocking out all of the usual page inventory and comments. The animations created in the desert with the cars leak out into this expanded space. As dawn breaks in the ad, the background of the page also goes through the sunrise colours. Visit http://vimeo.com/4281939 to see the experience.
The work echoes that of Nintendo’s Wario YouTube ad, where the violence of the game knocks all of the comments and buttons off the web page.