The #StartYourImpossible campaign, aired in 2018, celebrated the unique global partnership between Toyota and the Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Ahead of Tokyo 2020, we wanted to move it to the next level by matching Italian talents and Japanese culture into an inspiring and powerful message, pointing on beauty where it’s usually not expected to be found: scars, either inner or outer, are what makes us unique, because every time we face a hard challenge we return stronger and shinier. The campaign, autonomously proposed by the agency, was chosen as the official 2020 campaign for the Italian market and brought to life its powerful message through an integrated media format, designed to live across digital and TV by merging a branded content series, a social media driven contest, a limited edition work of art, a brand new award established by Toyota to celebrate courage, a live event to take place soon.

We designed a unique connection between Italian talent and Japanese tradition: we asked seven athletes from the Toyota Team (Gabriele Detti, swimming; Bebe Vio, paralympic fencing; Simona Quadarella, swimming; Andrea Pusateri, paralympic cycling; Ivan Federico, skateboarding; Vanessa Ferrari, gymnastics; Ivan Zaytsev, volley) to tell us about the hardest moment they faced in their life. Then we celebrated their courage by crafting the «Doroppu», a unique work of art designed to be broken by themselves as a symbolic act of catharsis, and the restored by a kintsugi master performing the original Japanese technique. The cracks are filled with pure gold, so that wounds become the most precious part of the object. Each athlete was finally returned his/her work of art by the kintsugi master in person, ready to become the Toyota Impossible Award: a brand new acknowledgment addressed to the New Unbreakables: seven extraordinary people who redefined the rules of mobility.

As the main goal of the campaign was to increase Toyota's brand reputation across a wide audience, while reaffirming its role as the main sponsor of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, we decided to focus the campaign strategy on the personal social media channels of the seven Toyota Team athletes. Each webisode was previewed through a 15" Instagram story and a 30" Facebook video posted first on the proprietary profiles of the featured talent, in order to start the spreading of the message with a sport sensitive audience, and also inviting them to discover the seven stories of the New Unbreakables, allowing to positively reach an audience different from the usual automotive fandom. The original campaign schedule was forced to change by the burst of the pandemic: a new content was crafted in almost real time to sync the campaign message with such an unprecedented situation.

March 3rd-31st 2020

Launch of the digital contest and the webseries: 7x120’’ episodes aired on the campaign website, plus 7x120" New Unbreakables stories. The launch took place through a social media campaign including: 1x40’’ launch film, 7x30’’ Facebook videos, 7x15’’ Instagram stories. The digital contest asked users to vote for the most inspiring story among those of the New Unbreakables: seven non-sport talents who rewrote the rules of mobility (including the Erasmus program founder, the youngest founder in the world of an aerospace company, the inventor of the first 3D printed prosthetic hand), with a trip to Tokyo for the winning user.

April 9th-May 16th 2020

Airing of the special 30"/60’’ TVC made ad hoc during the lockdown, followed by the 20" TVC introducing the docuseries, for an overall 924 placements.

May 3rd-June 5th 2020

Launch of the 7x13’ docuseries on Sky channels, later available on Sky On Demand.

Overall the campaign was able to generate a reach of 9.7 million people. Summing digital, ATL and OTT audience, "The Unbreakable" achieved 7.8 total video views, collecting an engagement of over 6.0 million interactions. The lockdown inspired commercial, crafted and aired as a response to the sudden spread of the pandemic, earned a significant media coverage as one of the first efforts of this kind on the Italian market.