For the Honda Brand, a Cinematic Stroke

WITH the automotive industry battling an economic downturn, is it the right time for a carmaker to introduce another installment in a corporate image campaign that carries the theme, “The power of dreams”?

The American Honda Motor Company believes so, bringing out this week three short films — a k a long commercials — to be watched online. The so-called webisodes, each about seven minutes, will be available, starting on Monday, at a Honda Web site (dreams.honda.com), under the rubric of the “Dream the Impossible documentary series.”

Commercials that will serve as trailers for the short films, meant to drive traffic to the Web site, are to appear on ABC.com, CBS.com, hulu.com and NBC.com. There will also be ads on sites devoted to news, technology and other topics; they include CNN.com, time.com, wired.com and yahoo.com.

The “power of dreams” campaign, which started in September 2007, and the webisodes are created by RPA, the longtime agency of American Honda Motor, in Santa Monica, Calif.

One webisode is scheduled be shown at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, where American Honda Motor is the automotive sponsor. Plans call for the short to run before “Mary and Max,” which is to be the first movie screened at the festival.

Attendees at the festival, in Park City, Utah, from Thursday through Jan. 25, may be treated to a ride in one of 12 new Insight hybrid small hatchbacks being supplied by American Honda Motor. Another new Honda, the FCX Clarity — a fuel-cell car the company is offering for lease in California — is to be on display at the festival. The campaign is emblematic of efforts by consumer marketers to maintain their advertising presence despite the ravages of the recession. Honda sales in the United States fell 34.7 percent in December compared with the same month of 2007; for all of 2008 they declined 8 percent compared with the previous year.

The Honda ads are particularly interesting because campaigns like it — seeking to burnish a longstanding corporate image, rather than sell products in the short run — are often the first casualties when consumers slow or stop spending.

“This is not a ‘Go out and buy a Honda’ campaign,” acknowledged Barbara Ponce, manager for corporate advertising at American Honda Motor in Torrance, Calif., part of the Honda Motor Company of Japan. Rather, she added, it is “communicating with our customers about what our brand stands for.”

“As we revisit our strategies in tough times, we have to ask the tough questions,” Ms. Ponce said. “In these economic times, everything becomes challenged.”

Still, she said, “we stayed the course” on the campaign, which the company began considering in the spring.

“Consumers are going back to the basics, back to foundations, values,” Ms. Ponce said, “and this campaign is focused on our values as a company, the people who make up what Honda is about.”

The webisodes, directed by Derek Cianfrance, are low-key in their promotion of Honda and are polished and absorbing enough to make a viewer (almost) forget they are sponsored shorts, and part of the trend toward branded entertainment.

The webisodes feature employees of American Honda Motor in realms like engineering, design and safety, along with executives like Takeo Fukui, president and chief executive at Honda Motor, the parent company. Some more recognizable names also appear in the shorts, among them Danica Patrick, who races Honda cars; the actor and screenwriter Christopher Guest, who drives an FCX Clarity; and Orson Scott Card, the science fiction author.

One webisode, “Mobility 2088,” imagines how people may get around eight decades from now. A speaker wonders how good an idea jetpacks would be if “all the idiots on the road today” filled the skies.

A second short, “Failure: the Secret to Success,” describes how setbacks can sometimes lead to achievement. Examples include the problem-plagued engines that Honda supplied for race cars in 1994, which were replaced with better ones a year later, and an orange color for the Honda Civic that dealers and consumers deemed “hideous”; the color subsequently found favor, when it was offered on the Honda Element.

A third webisode is devoted to what is described as a Honda corporate philosophy in the think-outside-the-box vein. Speakers discuss how better ideas are generated when there is no safety net, using Japanese metaphors like “kick out the ladder” — the name of the episode — or “take the ladder away and set fire to it.”

One speaker offers a frank opinion of those expressions. “Maybe it sounds better in Japanese,” he says.

The goal in producing the shorts was to convey some of the “honesty and authenticity” with which employees of American Honda Motor are imbued, said Todd Carey, vice president and associate creative director at RPA, who worked on the campaign with Curt Johnson, vice president and creative director.“I can’t really speak about the economic factors” involved in deciding to proceed with the campaign, Mr. Carey said, “but there’s an overwhelming sense of optimism that comes out of these films,” which may connect with consumers depressed by all the news about the recession.

“It’s not advertising optimism,” Mr. Carey said. “It’s authentic documentary-film optimism.”

The Honda sponsorship of the Sundance festival was arranged with the Sundance Institute by Evan Shapiro, president of the Sundance Channel and IFC TV, part of the Rainbow Entertainment Services division of the Cablevision Systems Corporation.

“Honda and the automotive business are under pressure,” Mr. Shapiro said. “The question is, how do you prepare for the other side of the recession?” The answer is a campaign like this, he said, which “isn’t some spots disguised as shorts” but rather entertainment that is “content driven.”

Although Ms. Ponce declined to discuss the budget for the campaign, she said the webisodes cost “70 percent of the cost to produce a regular 30-second TV spot.” That would mean a sum in the recession-friendly range of $200,000 to $300,000.