The Yaris is Toyota’s low-end economy offering. Compared to the fun colors, youthful image and nifty features of other cars in the segment, it is significantly lacking. Our mission was to move 40,000 units without any TV or print media. The entire campaign had to be digital. Considering the lackluster nature of the car along with the fact that our only channel was digital, we decided to reach out to nerds. Nerds don’t care about fancy cars in the first place. They also spend most of their time online. The challenge was creating content that resonated with these incredibly smart people who can sniff out a phony in two seconds. Our “nerd-speak” needed to be very genuine. We had to become nerds ourselves. Good thing that we already were. Nerds, that is.

itsacar.com is a one of a kind Google Chrome experiment built with the latest buzz technology including HTML5, WebGL, real-time physics, adaptive sound, CSS3 and multi-user socket communication. A looping tour video of the car plays while multiple users can interact with the site simultaneously. “It’s a Car!” is a campaign designed to harness the raw power of the ultra-obvious. Shattering all conventional wisdom, it boldly calls out the reasonably-priced, compact-sized “car” power of the Yaris. Nerdy comedian Michael Showalter dryly walks users through the “features” of the car such as wheels, windows and cup holders. Along with being able to alter the behavior of the host and the nature of the content, savvy users have the ability to grab all the open source code and recreate the site to their liking.