This Honda Civic campaign by Wieden + Kennedy London is cool. And pretty warm, too.
The centerpiece is an engaging 30-second film that shows the freezing and thawing of a Civic on a stylized desert set. This dramatically illustrates that the automaker tests its vehicles at temperatures ranging from -22°F to +176°F.
(This is helpful in case you're planning a road trip from the North Pole to Hell.)The tagline for the pan-European campaign is: "Reliability in the extreme."
Delightful details include a cowboy skeleton that morphs into a snowman and a rolling tumbleweed/snowball. According to a post on W+K's blog, the agency (and Johnny Hardstaff, who directed through RSA Films) encased the car in ice and let it melt over five hours—filming 200 takes using a motion-control rig, with 3-D enhancements providing the skeleton's transformation and other effects.
An interactive version is in the works that will allow users to control temperature changes and see the results. I wish they'd let us melt the Civic into a plastic-metal soup, then freeze it until it explodes into sparkling, razor-sharp shards of ice. Now that would be some fancy branding!
Nissan also recently launched ads that show the temperature testing of its vehicles. Though with Poison's Bret Michaels performing a power-schlock version of "Endless Love," that campaign is extreme for entirely different reasons.