• by Karl Greenberg , October 8, 2008

Five years after Wieden + Kennedy, London created a high-minded ad for Accord called "Cog" that became a sensation, Honda's U.S. agency, RPA, has done its own take on "esoterica" with "The Civic Musical Road"--an effort that uses a different kind of sound sculpture as the basis for ads and (it is to be hoped) hype.

 

(In fact, it has already been a topic on National Public Radio's weekly news quiz show, "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!")

Instead of Civic parts lined up to create a chain reaction, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based agency's campaign centers on highway "rumble strips"--those grooves on highway borders that warn vehicles that they are drifting off the road.

The agency altered the strips along a strip of Avenue K in Lancaster, Calif., to function like grooves in a vinyl record: when a car rolled over them at 55 mph, the strips "played" the "William Tell" overture.

The rumble strips no longer exist (the road was recently paved) but a campaign centering on it begins on Sunday. An ad in :15, :30 and :60 versions breaks Sunday on CBS sports broadcasting, while interactive ads will run on NBC.com and five Internet episodes will debut on Civic.Honda.com. All capture the mathematical development and physical implementation of the musical road.

Laura Hauseman, art director at RPA, says the inspiration came from a popular YouTube video clip of a guy making music by roller-blading past bottles filled with water and striking each with a spoke on the blades.

Jeff Moohr, management supervisor at RPA, says that the Webisodes will go live on civic.honda.com and that the campaign will run throughout the model year, from now until April.

"Tom Peyton [vp marketing] at Honda has been good about experimenting, and walking away from it to see if it works," says Moore. "I think he was a little surprised at how much media buzz it generated. I think the idea is to try do more stuff that lives beyond the 30-second spot."

The documentary-style TV spot shows the high-desert Avenue K--really a highway through the outback--as trucks, rollers, drill rigs and a road grader lay down a new strip of asphalt; team members (not actors) do the calculations on the road to determine spacing for the notes in the overture and create the proper grooves in the new asphalt.

A voiceover by project leader K.K. Barrett describes: "Here's the idea: What if we were able to change ... [rumble strip] tones into notes and then spread those notes across the lane of a freeway so that when someone drove down the road, it would play a song?"

Barrett says, "Okay, let's drive this thing and see what it sounds like."

Cut to the backseat perspective of a silver Honda Civic passenger cruising the quarter-mile stretch as the road does, indeed, play a slightly off-key version of the overture. The action concludes with celebratory clapping and exuberance amongst the team as the viewer hears, "Good work! It's a success." The Civic and Honda logos close out the spot.

The webisodes are several minutes long, and delve into the brain-storming, planning, logistics and execution, with descriptions of the road as a kind of digital device and the grooves as "stored data" as one team member, who is a mathematician and musician, puts it.

The ads were produced by Park Pictures' Lance Acord, who shot "Lost in Translation," "Marie Antoinette" and "Where the Wild Things Are," among other films.