• by Karl Greenberg , January 7, 2016

Honda’s new campaign for the 2016 Civic is true to form, with high-art visuals plus a big dose of animated fantasia. It is a creative palette that the automaker’s U.S. agency RPA has been keying into with recent campaigns. But the new effort is also deep into social media and native content, via partnerships with the likes of BuzzFeed and Snapchat. 

The launch spot for the campaign shows an engineer as “dreamer” from whose imagination, literally, a Civic sedan emerges and then travels on a wild ride through imagined forests, mountains, doing loops and rollercoaster turns around the engineer's head. The national and cable ad is set to a new song, “Walking on a Dream,” by Empire of the Sun, and closes with the Civic pulling to a stop in a real setting, with V.O. saying  “Direct from our imagination. The all-new Civic.”

The social aspect of the campaign includes marquee video ads on Instagram, starting Jan. 8, plus paid media through March. Honda says that on Jan. 8, it will also debut on the Snapchat platform augmented with takeovers on gaming site IGN, and BuzzFeed Discover, with video ads also running across national and regional Snapchat Live Stories.  

On Instagram, Honda created three marquee ads, similar to a home-page takeover, that are being shown as the first promoted post that visitors see when they open up their Instagram. Then they are served a new Honda Civic video if they check their Instagram account multiple times throughout the day, per a RPA spokesperson. She says the concept is termed "Bending Reality,“ which shows the vehicle in an environment that seems normal at first, but provides an unexpected twist. “This aligns with the overall strategy that the new Civic is one that you never saw coming.” 

For the Snapchat program, when a user takes a snap, they will be offered multiple filter options, depending on their location, that they can apply to their photo before they post to their followers. One of the options is the Civic filter, which will be available nationally. The Civic filter includes a silhouetted image of the Civic along with “They See Me Rollin’” text at the top. 

BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has created three 10-second videos that will run on their Discover channel on Jan. 8. BuzzFeed worked directly with Honda to create this content, while RPA created three 10-second videos featuring Lopez. Those videos, with a “New Year’s Resolution” theme, will run as takeover content on the IGN Discover channel, and across other Discover and Live Stories channels. 

And there are old-school print ads showing the Civic springing out of a Honda engineer’s open hinged head, slated for Road & Track, Autoweek, Sports Illustrated, People, ESPN The Magazine and US Weekly. Digital launches with homepage takeovers on Yahoo and YouTube.