When you think of car commercials, you probably picture beautiful landscapes with open roads and a shiny new car seamlessly gliding and maneuvering around curves and up hills or, perhaps, a new SUV dominating rugged terrain. Agency 180LA wanted to go a different direction for Mitsubishi’s latest campaign for its 2013 Outlander Sport.
The campaign is a call to arms against posting a picture of your favorite wine label or checking in at Le Bernadin. “End Pretentiousness” includes TV and point of purchase, but the main attraction is the campaign’s “Unpretentious“ Facebook app, which lets you drive through and wreck the pretentious stuff that your Facebook friends have posted. Think of it like an updated version of Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice,” which, in 2009, offered people rewards for unfriending all those randoms who somehow ended up as your Facebook friends.
It’s not a bad idea. The amount of pretentious stuff that people post on Facebook is out of control; from fancy vacation pics, to check-ins at nice restaurants, to glamor shots and so on, there’s a lot of showing off that goes on online.
“People are forgetting the difference between sharing and bragging,” said 180LA art director Beth Fujiura. “Social media has made it too easy to brag to your friends about the things you do. We thought it would be funny to bring people back down to earth.”
Once you grant the app access to your Facebook account, it searches through your friends’ posts, updates, photos and likes to determine your five most pretentious friends. The creative team created a database of pretentious behaviors in social media and using keywords, the app pulls your friends’ pretentious pictures up and shows the Outlander Sport driving through these pictures and posts and destroying them. It’s really entertaining to see which of you friends get targeted and what kind of ridiculous stuff the app pulls up and then runs a car through. It’s kind of cathartic and therapeutic actually.
“The nice thing about it is the app is using math, and you can’t argue with those numbers: If it says you’re pretentious, you’re pretentious,” said Fujiura.
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