• by Karl Greenberg , January 14, 2016

Maybe Jerry Seinfeld won't need so much coffee in his car. And maybe he’ll finally get that Acura NSX he’s been jonesing for since 2012. The supercar makes its formal debut on Thursday with a new marketing campaign, "Point of View,” which also brings back the theme line “Precision Crafted Performance,” that launched around the time of the debut of the first-generation NSX in 1990.

What is totally new — in addition to the NSX — is the voice of the brand, Michael B. Jordan, who just polished off the title role in the new “Rocky” film “Creed” and was the lead in “Fruitville Station” among other roles, including in "The Wire" and "Friday Night Lights."

The new brand campaign debuts during the NFL AFC playoffs with a 60-second spot about Acura’s approach to vehicle development around precision and innovation. The launch ad is a major shift away from luxury as merely sharp engineering, and toward defining the brand for pulse-raising performance. It punctuates shots of Acura vehicles, including the NSX, racing, cruising, and under the eye of designers and engineers, with such lines — spoken by Jordan, and in stylized racetrack-style supers — as “If there’s a better way, take it”; “If there’s a mold, break it”; and “If there’s an icon, remake it.”  As the Acura micrometer logo comes up, Jordan says “This is what we make. This is how we make it.”

Acura says the campaign will include extensions on the brand’s digital and social media platforms, as well as on ESPN.com, Yahoo and Facebook. Acura will tout the halo car, NSX, as an American supercar with an ad during the first quarter of the Super Bowl.

Acura faces some serious challenges. Although it is the first Japanese luxury brand in the U.S., it has not achieved the sales and status of its chief competitor across the street in Torrance, California, Lexus. Both Acura and the other Japanese luxury contender, the much younger Infiniti, have struggled to achieve something else, something that Lexus has: escape velocity from its parent/sibling brand. Infiniti went so far as to move operations to Hong Kong.

Honda Motor America’s decision in 2013 to extract Acura advertising from under the wing of Honda’s agency, RPA and assign it to Mullen — and the new focus on the NSX as brand halo — is a clear effort to do the same by creating some emotional gravity (read “passion”) that its mass-market sibling doesn’t have, and probably doesn’t need.

The brand has taken different advertising approaches over the past couple of years since bringing in Mullen (now Mullen Lowe, since its merger last year with Lowe and Partners). Its strongest creative effort to date -- one that snagged Mullen Lowe and Acura a One Club honor this week in Detroit -- may be its “Crash Test Dummies” spot last fall, touting Acura safety in the MDX crossover. In the ad, of which we see a snippet in the new anthem spot, an engineer takes his job very seriously: to him those mannequins are his wife and kids. But he will only have to worry about his wife with the NSX. It only seats two.