The bigger, the better? From the very first day it was introduced to the European market a decade ago, smart fortwo proves that this notion is quite arguable. With the new campaign developed by Razorfish and Merkley & Partners, New York, the car is also changing the car attitudes of Americans and tries to beat their ‘obsession’ with ‘big.’ The marketing initiative under the ‘Unbig. Uncar’ tagline, kicked off in the USA in September (it’s the first-ever smart’s campaign since the official launch of the brand in this country in 2008), revolves around the idea that small and eco vehicles can be much better, more ‘unboring, unobey, uncluttered, unblah’, than traditional bigger cars.
Mercedes
Johanna Basford, a designer who uses black ink to create breath-taking images, is teaming up with Mercedes-owned smart to cover the whole body of the electric car in phantasmagoric drawings and put the car on display to Londoners.
However, the project entitled ‘TwitterPicture’ is much more than just creative collaboration between the automaker and the artist. This initiative puts crowd-sourcing strategy to work using the power of social media, namely Twitter.
The story of close relationship between brands and cinematography started nearly at the same time as the cinema itself was born—in the beginning of the movie era, the big companies promoted their products though short clips which were screened before movies. Now it’s not that easy to tell for sure for which product the pioneer ad was created, but according to a range of sources (IMDB is one of them), the first filmed advertising for a today’s global brand was shot for Dewar’s Scotch Whisky (1897). Today, connections between filmmaking industry and brands go beyond this simple presence and include a lot of examples such as much discussed product placement, festival sponsorship and opening cinema clubs, cinema-related advertising campaigns, collaboration with filmmakers on commercials, and creating movies under brands’ supervision.