Marketing in the News - Toyota's "The Breadwinner"

     I love Toyota. My grandma's 1988 80 Series Land Cruiser prompted me to buy my 1991 80 Series after a childhood of rides with all my cousins in her rolling greenhouse. My family owns other Toyotas and we are diehard fans. There really is no need to market to people like us, but as Toyota launches new models and attempts to create new fans, making another plain car commercial is not enough in today's commercially over-saturated world. The easiest way to make advertisements unavoidable is to make them integral with the media being consumed. So, Toyota is partnering with family comedian, Nate Bargatze, in what I dub a "commovie", a movie length commercial, where he plays a Toyota Dealership Salesman who is forced to become a stay-at-home parent when his wife becomes the breadwinner, the namesake of the movie. 

"The Breadwinner" (Photo from The Breadwinner trailer)

    The Breadwinner takes place frequently in a Toyota dealership where characters are being sold cars and pitches are being made for cars right in front of the audience. Nate Bargatze's character is an advertisement itself as he carries his salesman attitude and habits into his new job as a dad. From the trailer, it also appears that every character drives a new, shiny Toyota as well. It's clear this movie exists for product placement.

    This is not a new tactic by any means, bad guys in action movies made in Europe always drive blacked out Land Rovers and in American action movies they always drive blacked out Track Hawks and Cadillac SUVs. This is a new level of in your face though and I think that will be very clear to the general audience after TV ads are run advertising both the movie and the cars side by side. This is definitely what Toyota is going for, their target audience are families who value classy trims, the Toyota personality cult, and the traits the vehicles themselves offer. To new buyers and those who are new to Toyotas marketing they may be very attracted to buying their cars, but to those like me, with Toyota's leaky power steering pump fluid running through my veins, seeing all of this in a movie will be a lot to choke down. People know when they are being advertised to, explicitly or not, and this has the potential to turn viewers away. If I were to make this movie and still have a heavy Toyota influence, I would write Nate Bargatze's character to have significantly more depth and other defining traits than just a car-lot salesman, because that's all he is, the whole movie. Centering as a father isn't a part of his character until the end(I assume the movie has yet to be released). Maybe instead of a movie, I would make a documentary about the best Toyota salesman and follow them around; however, there will obviously be less appeal to that.

    Toyota is seeking to take product placement to the next level and make a whole movie centered around their cars. Will a "commovie" be able to pull audiences in? Or will it be ignored and forgotten? All I know is that Toyota is making an effort to appeal to family audiences and this movie will certainly accomplish that. Regardless, I'll still buy Toyota. 

The Breadwinner trailer

Toyota Newsroom article