• by Tanya Gazdik , May 11, 2018

In an unusual move, Acura is bringing back a commercial it debuted 2 1/2 years ago.

The emotional commercial plays up how important safety is to the automaker, a premise that’s as important now as ever. The overall objective of “Acura MDX – The Test” TV spot was to portray to viewers Acura’s everyday commitment to safety in a personal, emotional way. 

The spot aims to show crash tests aren’t emotionless tasks by showcasing an Acura engineer and his reaction to placing the test dummies — who in his mind’s eye could be him and his family — into the vehicle. 

Acura says it wants to create a zero-collision society with vehicles that make the roads a safer place for everyone, and this TV spot helps communicate that vision.

“As safety is a key factor when choosing a new vehicle, ‘The Test’ captures the emotion that drives our engineers to develop vehicles aimed at keeping all occupants safe,” Ed Beadle, senior manager of integrated marketing at Acura, tells Marketing Daily. “Advanced safety is achieved through engineering, and at Acura, we take it a step further by taking the safety of each customer personal.”

Acura was the first luxury brand awarded top safety ratings across its entire model line with NHTSA 5-star overall vehicle score. Passive safety technology like high-strength steel and airbags are critical once the vehicle gets into an incident. 

“But in addition to passive safety, we hope to help prevent an accident or mitigate its severity with our active and driver-assistive technology suite, AcuraWatch,” according to a spokesperson. Today, the automaker has more than 207,000 vehicles equipped with AcuraWatch on U.S. roads.

The spot debuted on Oct. 18, 2015.  The run for the current flight is from April 30 to May 31. MullenLowe was the creative agency and RPA purchased media buy on this current campaign.