User:GeeJo/Sandbox/Cog

Cog is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Honda in 2003 to promote seventh-generation Honda Accord cars. The commercial follows a Heath Robinson contraption constructed from pieces from a disassembled Accord. The campaign surrounding Cog was handled by advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy for £6 million. Production of the commercial itself was contracted to production company Partizan Midi-Minuit, on a budget of £1 million. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet directed the piece, and post-production work was completed by The Mill. Cog premiered on British television on 6 April, 2003, during a commercial break in ITV's coverage of the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix.

The campaign proved to be a huge popular, critical, and financial success. Less than 24 hours after the campaign was launched, Honda's website became the second-most-visited automotive website. Over 250,000 people made use of the commercial's interactive menu system, of whom 10,000 went on to order a DVD of the commercial, or a brochure for the Accord. The reaction to the commercial within the media industry was equally large???, with articles on the piece appearing in publications such as The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and The Guardian. Cog received more awards from the television and advertising industries than any commercial in history, including a Cannes Gold Lion, two IPA Effectiveness Awards, and a Grand Clio.

Cog is the first of a three-part series of ads released during 2003, the other parts being Sense and Everyday. The series itself was part of the larger "Power of Dreams" campaign, which had been running since 2002. Due to the prohibitive cost of airing a 120 second commercial, the full version of Cog was aired only a handful of times, and only in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden. Despite this, it is regarded as one of the most influential commercials of the past decade, and has spawned a number of imitations and parodies. Controversy arose, however, when the producers of the 1987 documentary "The Way Things Go" accused the team behind Cog of plagiarising their work.

Sequence
The sequence starts with a transmission bearing rolling down a board into a synchro hub. The hub in turn rolls into a gear wheel cog, which falls off of the board and into a camshaft and pulley wheel. The camshaft swings around into the centre section of an exhaust pipe mounted on top of an engine crankshaft assembly. The exhaust in turn swings round to knock, which in turn swings into the first of a series of valve stems. The valve stems roll down a front bonnet placed on top of an alloy wheel rim, releasing an engine oil dipstick with a throttle actuator shaft on the end. The disptick flicks over an engine cam cover into a radiator. The radiator overturns, falling onto a wheel balanced on top of a water pump housing. This wheel rolls off and knocks into the first of a series of three weighted wheels, which roll up a ramp into a brake disc.

The disc falls onto a seatbelt which, using a suspension lower arm as a lever, pulls a rear seat back into an upright position. As it does so, the seat disturbs a front windscreen wiper blade attached to a pulley wheel. The wiper blade travels along a bonnet release cable and overturns a tin of engine oil. The tin empties its contents onto a lower shelf, which disturbs the balance of several valve springs against a flywheel. The oil alters the balance enough to cause several of the springs to roll. The valve springs are slowed enough by the spilt oil to allow them to drop into a cylinder head assembly mounted on a seesaw constructed of a board placed on a rocker shaft and gear wheel cog.

On the other end of the seesaw is a 12 V battery. As the assembly drops, the battery is pushed into a cylinder block wired up to an engine fan. It completes the circuit, and the fan rolls across the open floor into an Anti-lock braking system modulator unit. The modulator unit knocks a rear silencer box down a ramp and into a rear suspension link. The link pushes a transmission selector arm into a brake pedal loaded with a rubber brake grommet. The grommet launches into a tyre mounted on a front end assembly, knocking it off and onto a wire suspended between two brake discs. The wire pulls a con rod, rotating it into a cylinder liner.

The liner rolls down an incline, slowed by another con rod, the electric window of a front door assembly, and a series of interior grab handles. It falls onto another battery, completing a circuit. The circuit powers a windscreen washer jet pointed at a windscreen. The automated water sensors in the windscreen activate a pair of wiper blades, causing them to crawl across the floor. The wipers release a handbrake lever keeping a quartet of suspended window panels in place. As the windows swing round, the resulting air draft knocks the liner panel of a rear tool tray into a rocker shaft, which rolls across the floor into a suspension coil spring. The collision causes enough of a vibration to knock a second shaft into a battery. This activates the Accord's CD player (playing Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight"). The vibrations from the car speakers shake a coil spring just enough to set it rolling off a rear tailgate glass panel, and onto a brake pedal.

Once pushed, the pedal causes a set of rear shock absorbers to depress, pushing a solenoid onto a button on an ignition key. The button remotely closes the hatchback of an assembled Honda Accord on a brake-disc-mounted trailer. The closing of the door causes the weight of the car to shift enough to start it rolling down the slope to its final position in front of a tonneau cover with "Accord" printed on it, weighted with a wheel hub assembly. The piece closes with a voiceover from writer Garrison Keillor, who asks, "Isn't it nice when things just work?"

Background
Sales of Honda products within Europe had been in decline since 1998, and the company's position as the number two Japanese automotive company, behind Toyota, had been taken by Nissan. Within Europe, Honda cars were seen as staid, uninspiring, and of lesser quality than European brands. In one survey, one-fourth of people asked said they wouldn't dream of buying a Honda as their next car. In 2002, advertising agency W+K pitched to Honda a new campaign based on the company's Japanese motto, "Yume No Chikara" ("See One's Dreams"). This "Power of Dreams" campaign, of which Cog is a part, was to rework Honda's image into being warmer and more consumer-friendly.

The first series of promotions in the United Kingdom centered around the strapline "What if...?", and took place in "dream-like" scenarios. The first television campaign, OK Factory, explicitly introduced the premise of the campaign by asking what would happen if the world's favourite word (Okay) was replaced with "What if?". The next few pieces of the campaign: Pecking Order, Seats, and Bus Lane for television, Doodle, Big Grin, and Oblonger for radio, and a number of matching print advertisements, became progressively more surreal, featuring oddities such as a traffic cone draped in leopard fur and trees growing traffic lights from their branches. In 2003, creative team Matt Gooden and Ben Walker approached the "Dream Factory", as the committee responsible for maintaining consistency within the campaign had come to be called, with an idea for a new television and cinema piece based around a chain reaction of movement involving parts from a Honda car. The project would eventually come to be known as Cog.

Pre-production
Cog was pitched to Honda executives in mid-2002 by W+K art director Matt Gooden and copywriter Ben Walker. Prior to Cog, Gooden and Walker had worked as a creative team on a number of award-winning projects since meeting at a copywriting class in 1988, including a Guinness World Record-holding one-second advertisement while working for advertising agency Leo Burnett Worldwide, and a depression-awareness booklet for the Charlie Walker Memorial Trust. The central concept of the pitch was a 30-second trial film inspired by several sources, including the children's board game Mouse Trap, Caractacus Potts' breakfast-making machine in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and a 1987 Swiss art film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss titled Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go).

The Honda executives were enthusiastic and encouraging about the project, and gave the green light for work to go ahead, with a production budget of £1M. Their proposal approved, Gooden and Walker recruited a London-based team comprising engineers, special effects technicians, car designers, and even a sculptor. The team spent a month working with parts from a disassembled Honda Accord before even the design for the commercial's set was finalised. It took a further month for approval to be granted for the final version of the script, which was put together from the ideas collected by the team from working with the parts. Honda specifically requested that the script make use of certain features of the Accord, including a door with a wing-mirror indicator and a rain-sensitive windscreen.

With the script approved and a handful of preliminary conceptual sketches, Gooden and Walker set about finding a director for the project. Eventually, the pair took on Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, of London-based production company Partizan Midi-Minuit, to direct Cog. Bardou-Jacquet had previously won several awards for his work, including music videos to Alex Gopher's "The Child", Playgroup's "Number One", and Air's "How Does It Make You Feel".

Production
Bardou-Jacquet set aside two months of the schedule for creating hundreds of conceptual drawings of potential interactions between the parts, and a further four months for practical testing and development. Several chain reactions in the script were abandoned during the testing period, including airbag explosions and collisions between front and rear sections of the car The team worked on small sections of the script at a time, piecing together chain reactions that worked particularly well, until the full and final sequence was developed.

Because Cog was to be produced with a minimum of computer-generated imagery work, the majority of the four-month production schedule was set aside for getting the exact positioning of the components worked out. The parts were set out in a Paris studio to an accuracy of a sixteenth of an inch. The exacting nature of the testing and the pressure of the schedule took its toll on the crew. Some workers went days without sleep. Others reported having bad dreams about the spare car parts. The Accord shown at the end of Cog was, at the time, one of only five hand-assembled models in the world, one having already been disassembled to aid in development of the commercial. By the time production finished, the accumulated spare parts filled two articulated lorries. Several parts of the planned sequence had to be abandoned due to a shortage of new Accord parts.

Filming itself consisted of two continuous sixty-second dolly shots taken from a technocrane, which were to be stitched together in post-production. Four days of filming were required to get these shots, two days for each minute-long section. Filming session lasted seven hours, and the work was exacting. Despite all the testing that went into the chain reactions prior to filming, small variations in ambient temperature, humidity and settling dust continually threw off the movement of the parts enough to end the sequence early. It took 90 minutes on the first day just to get the initial transmission bearing to roll correctly into the second. In all, 606 takes were needed to complete Cog, of which 70-80 were performed in the four days of filming.

Post-production
While the post-production work required on Cog was limited due to the decision to create the piece with a minimum of computer-generated imagery, several sections still needed editing. For this, the team contracted production company The Mill. To further reduce the work required in post, Flame artist Barnsley (aka Andrew Wood ) spent a lot of time on set during filming, where he advised the film crew on whether particular sections could be accomplished more easily by re-shooting or in post. Even so, the constant movement of parts on-camera meant that there were no good lighting references to work from when the time came to stitch the two 60-second shots into a single seamless piece. Additional work included re-centering the frame to stay closer to the action, removal of wires, highlighting a spray of water, and adjusting the speed of some sections for dramatic purposes.

Schedule
Cog was first aired on British television on Sunday 6 April, 2003. It filled an entire commercial break in ITV's coverage of the Brazilian Grand Prix. The release was widely remarked upon by the media, including articles in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and The Guardian. The day after the first airing of Cog, the Honda website received more hits than at any time in its history, and overnight became the second largest automotive website. The full 120-second version of the commercial aired only a handful of times in the ten days after the initial screening, including during a UEFA Champion's League football match between Manchester United and Real Madrid on Tuesday 8 April. After this period, the full version was put aside in favour of a 60-second and five 30-second variations, which continued to air for a further six weeks. These shortened versions made use of interactive options on the Sky Digital television network. The interactivity of these spots was achieved by encouraging viewers to press a button on their remote control, which would bring up a menu allowing the viewer to see the full 120-second version of the commercial. In addition, the menu offered a free documentary DVD and a brochure for the Honda Accord. The DVD, which was also included as an insert in 1.2 million newspapers the same week, contained a "making-of" feature which contained interviews and footage documenting the production of the ad, a virtual tour of the Accord, the original music video to "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, and an illustrated guide to all the parts shown in Cog.

The interactive 30-second version of Cog proved hugely successful. Over 250,000 people used the menu option, spending an average of two and a half minutes in the dedicated advertising area. A significant number watched the looped 120-second version for up to ten minutes. Of those who opened the menu, 10,000 requested either a DVD or a brochure, and Honda used the data collected from the interactive option to arrange a number of test drives.

Expansion of the Cog campaign to a worldwide market was fraught with a number of logistical difficulties. The cost of airing a 120-second commercial proved prohibitive in most markets, and this, combined with Honda's use of different advertising agencies and the relative autonomy of its different business units in marketing decisions, meant that Cog screened in only a few selected markets. Cog appeared on television in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia,, and in cinemas in only a handful of other countries. For most markets, including the United States, the only way for audiences to see the piece was via the Internet.

Plagiarism accusations
Shortly after Cog appeared on television, Wieden + Kennedy received a letter from Peter Fischli and David Weiss, creators of the 1987 art film "Der Lauf der Dinge", in which the duo pointed out a number of similarities between their work and Cog. When interviewed by Creative Review magazine, the pair made clear that they wished they had been consulted on the advertisement, and that they would not have given permission if asked. Media publications quickly picked up the story, and asserted that Fishcli and Weiss were threatening to sue the car manufacturer for breach of copyright. Comparisons were made between the case and that of British director Mehdi Norowzian against Diageo for allegedly plagiarising his work in their 1995 Anticipation campaign for Guinness-brand stout. Despite these speculations, Fischli and Weiss never filed a lawsuit against either Wieden + Kennedy or Honda UK, knowing that there was little hope of success under UK copyright law.

Awards
Cog received an unprecedented amount of critical acclaim, winning more awards than any commercial in history. Its success was such that, with the awards season split between 2003 and 2004, it was both the most-awarded commercial of 2004 and the 33rd-most-awarded commercial of 2003. The jury for the British Television Advertising Awards gave the piece the highest score of any commercial ever recorded, with the jury's chairman Charles Inge commenting: "My own opinion is that this is the best commercial that I have seen for at least ten years." After awarding Cog with several Silver awards, the president-elect of the D&AD Awards, Dick Powell, said of the piece: "It delights and entrances, [...] it communicates engineering quality and quality of thinking, and leaves you with a smile."

Having swept the majority of award ceremonies within the advertising community to date, Cog was widely believed to be the favourite for the industry's top award, the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Its chief competition was thought to be Sheet Metal for Saturn automobiles. Cog held a disadvantage in that the chairman of the Cannes voting jury, Dan Wieden, was one of the founders of Wieden + Kennedy, the firm responsible for creating Cog; tradition holds that it is bad form for the chairman of the jury to vote for a piece by his own agency.

The result at Cannes was a surprise; after the longest judging period in the festival's history, the Grand Prix went to neither of the two event favourites. Instead, the jury awarded the prize to Lamp, a U.S. advertisement directed by Spike Jonze for the IKEA chain of furniture stores. Voted second was a British ad, Ear Tennis for the Xbox video game console. Chief among speculated reasons for the outcome was the plagiarism debate surrounding Cog. Ben Walker told trade publication Adweek "A couple of people on the jury told me the reason it didn't win is 'cause they didn't want to be seen to be awarding something which people in some corners had said we copied."

In advertising
The popularity and recognition received by Cog led a number of other companies to create pieces in a similar vein, either as homages, in parody, or simply to further explore the design area. The first of these was Just Works, a deliberate parody advertisement for the 118 118 directory assistance service in the summer of 2003, in which the Honda parts are replaced with such oddities as a tractor wheel, a flamingo and a space hopper. Just Works was created by advertising agency WCRS. It was written by Anson Harris and directed by JJ Keith, whose previous work included spots for BT Cellnet, Heinz, and Guinness, and the Oscar-nominated short film Holiday Romance. Honda refused to give WCRS permission to copy their advert, which, under BACC guidelines, prevented either the 60- or 90-second Just Works spots from appearing on British television. Instead, the ad was promoted virally and shown online. Just Works went on to win a number of awards in its own right, including Gold awards from the British Television Advertising Awards and the Creative Circle Awards, a Silver Lion from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, and a Bronze award from The One Show.

In 2004, BBC Radio Manchester asked for and received permission from Wieden+Kennedy to produce a television advertisement in the style of Cog to advertise coverage of football events by local radio stations. The ad, which was directed by Reg Sanders and produced by Tracy Williams, shows pieces of sports equipment such as footballs and team shirts knocking into each other in sequence. In all, 65 versions were broadcast, each tailored to advertise the local BBC Radio station. W+K were pleased to gain the extra publicity, and Neil Christie, managing director of W+K London, commented: "We are very happy that every time the BBC runs one of their adverts, the person who watches it thinks of Honda."

Campaign magazine listed Cog, along with Balls for the Sony BRAVIA line of high-definition televisions, as one of the most-imitated commercials in recent times. Among the pieces believed to be inspired by Cog are a 2003 piece for breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs, Nearness for the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and the 2007 epic Tipping Point, advertising Guinness-brand draught stout. When asked about the similarities between Cog and Tipping Point, Paul Brazier, executive creative director at the advertising agency behind Tipping Point, replied: "I knew the ad was similar in places, but as an executive creative director, you have to look at things like that and make a decision. The fact the TV ad was only part of a huge internet campaign meant that I thought it wasn’t that near Cog."

Outside advertising
Cog has also inspired a number of other creative endeavours outside of the advertising industry, including an elaborate domino-toppling attempt by world record holder Robin Weijers, and a three-minute introductory trailer to the BBC show Bang Goes the Theory. In 2004, the United States Coast Guard Training Centre in California requested permission to use the ad in their training regime as a demonstration of the importance of attention to detail. Discussion of Cog as an example of the confluence of art and advertising, and as an example of inspiration versus plagiarism, has been ongoing. Turner Prize-nominated artist Mark Leckey included Cog as part of his video art installation "Cinema in the Round", currently on display in the Tate Britain art gallery in London. It was also the focus of a panel discussion at the Tate Modern during a retrospective of Fischli & Weiss' work there in 2006.

The next piece created by W+K for Honda, Sense, advertised the company's "Integrated Motor System" hybrid car technology. Deliberate steps were taken to distance the spot from Cog, using metaphor to make the promotion, rather than focusing on the technology itself. In 2005, Honda was once again in contention for the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Film Festival, with the animated 60-second spot Grrr. This time, it returned home triumphant, defeating Singing in the rain for the Volkswagen Golf and Stella Artois' Pilot to bring home the top prize. Director Antoine Bardou-Jacquet went on to create two further Honda advertisements for W+K. Choir, created with the help of fellow Cog team-members Ben Walker and Matt Gooden, was released in 2006, and Problem Playground in 2008.

Cog

 * Cog - via W+K website (streaming .flv format)
 * Cog - via Honda website (direct download link, .flv format)
 * Making of Cog - via Honda website (direct download link, .flv format)

Derivatives

 * BBC Radio homage - via YouTube
 * Making of the BBC Radio homage - via YouTube
 * Tipping Point - via AMV BBDO website
 * Making of Tipping Point - via YouTube

Category:2003 in British television Category:2003 works Category:Honda Category:Television commercials Category:Viral marketing Category:Grand CLIO Winners