• by Christine Champagne , October 1, 2007

Toyota's campaign for the new Scion xD stands out from the crowd.

With the Little Deviant-themed campaign, San Francisco's ATTIK and Toyota's marketing group have positioned the Toyota Scion xD five-door sub-compact as - in the words of ATTIK co-founder and group creative director Simon Needham - "a badass."

"It seems that the small car market has very much been taken over by cute and funny and fun themes, and from the point of view of Scion, we are a dark brand," Needham says. "We're what you might term a nighttime brand."

Rebels With a Cause

With that in mind, ATTIK created an integrated marketing campaign for the Scion xD, which went on sale in August, centered on a group of rebellious Little Deviants who are set on bringing back originality to a lifeless gray city full of conformist clones known as Sheeple.

The expectation is that the target demographic for this campaign - urban men in their mid-20s who are artistic and into nightlife - will see themselves in the Little Deviants and view the Scion xD, which has more product customizations than any other car brand, Needham says, as a car that will allow them to differentiate themselves from everybody else.

The animation style that runs throughout the campaign certainly stands out. The Little Deviants are starkly rendered in white and black and boast rather monstrous features, including spikes and horns protruding from their bodies. The characters' faces incorporate the car's branding, with an X serving as eyes and a big D as mouths. "We're really trying to integrate the brand and the identity and the logo, and some people have seen it, and some people haven't," Needham says. "But I'm always overjoyed when somebody says, 'Oh, yeah, I saw the xD face.'"

While there are nine distinct Little Deviant characters, the Sheeple all look exactly the same with their skinny, soft bodies, beards and wide-eyed looks underscoring their bland conformity, Needham explains.

The Little Deviants narrative, pitting them against the boring Sheeple, plays out offline in a variety of media, including a cinema spot, pop-up as well as scratch and sniff ads (while the Little Deviants are stinky, the Scion xD has that nice new car smell) in print publications and guerilla activities (the Little Deviants hang from lamp posts and appear to come out of grates on the sides of buildings) and billboards, which they partially consume, in major cities across America, including Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta and New York.

The characters also appear online in ads on gaming sites GameSpot.com and GamesRadar.com and paid search is part of the effort.

One of the integral elements of the campaign is an online game, the Book of Deviants, at LittleDeviant.com, which launched June 15. Traffic is driven to the game site through a link on Scion.com as well as the various offline and online components of the campaign. As of August 6, total page views were 3.5 million, with the
average visitor spending six minutes and 50 seconds visiting the site. Aside from playing the game, visitors can customize an xD, insert the Little Deviants into their own photos and view the cinema spot.

Some have labeled the game violent - the Little Deviants are out to collect the blood of the Sheeple and do so by clawing them and hurling them against buildings. But Needham takes issue with that assessment. "Our attitude is, 'it's a cartoon, and you'll see a lot worse on 'South Park' and 'Tom and Jerry,'" Needham maintains, noting, "You'll notice not one [Sheeple] dies. Whether 'they're getting decapitated or not, they're still alive, the same way Wile E. Coyote gets squashed by a rock and is up the next day chasing after the Road Runner."

It's Got Game

George Kang, senior analyst with automotive information site Edmunds.com, believes the online game is a smart way to reach young male car buyers. "Gaming is a huge industry, and it fits in perfectly with this age," Kang reasons, adding, "The genre of the game is interesting. I don't know if violent is the right word. But it's definitely not like your G-rated game. It has an edge to it, and I think you're really appealing to that [young male] demographic with this. You position the xD in a more masculine way, and if you think of most compact cars, there is a more of a feminine quality to them." (The Scion xD is competing in a sub-compact car market that includes the Chevy Aveo, Nissan Versa and Honda Fit.)

Delving further into charges that the game is violent, Kang says, "It's all perspective. If you talk to a 16- to 24-year-old person, they would say, 'No, this isn't violent, it's really funny.'" (That's actually the response Kang got when he asked some younger friends to play the game and give him feedback.)

Like Kang, Jupiter-Research automotive analyst Belis Aksoy also sees the online game as a valuable tool in reaching the target demo. "Games are definitely effective with the younger audience, especially if you look at consumers [under] 35. They are more likely to play games on a frequent basis, and also when you look at their response to online advertising, they are more likely to play online games as compared to consumers who are above 34."

More specifically, according to JupiterResearch stats, online consumers between the ages of 18 and 35 are four times more likely to play games as a result of seeing an online automotive ad than online consumers over 35 (the breakdown is 12 percent and 3 percent, respectively).

In Perfect Position

Aksoy expects that teenagers will also be drawn to the game and establishing a brand preference for Scion in the process. (Needham says that reaching teens was not part of the goal with this campaign, so if the game does appeal to them, it is a happy coincidence.)

In addition to entertaining and engaging its intended audience through game play, Kang credits LittleDeviant.com with illustrating the fact that the Scion xD offers numerous options for customization. "The way Scion makes money is on the accessories," Kang notes. "The latest stat that I heard was people were spending anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 on accessories for these cars. So Scion has to position the car - if that's where they are making their revenue - like they do here as something very cool, something 'that's going to stand out when you put in the extra carbon fiber on the outside of the door trim or buy the interior light package or the Razo shift knob."

Overall, Aksoy rates ATTIK's efforts to market the Scion (the agency has handled the car line for four years) as successful. "I was reading studies where they found that 80 percent of Generation Y consumers are aware of Scion," Aksoy says. "This shows how effective they've been to date in terms of promoting the Scion brand."