Cog (advertisement)

"Cog" is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Honda in 2003 to promote the seventh-generation Accord line of cars. It follows the convention of a Rube Goldberg machine, utilizing a chain of colliding parts taken from a disassembled Accord. Wieden+Kennedy developed a £6 million marketing campaign around "Cog" and its partner pieces, "Sense" and "Everyday", broadcast later in the year. The piece itself was produced on a budget of £1 million by Partizan Midi-Minuit. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet directed the seven-month production, contracting The Mill to handle post-production. The 120-second final cut of "Cog" was broadcast on British television on 6 April 2003, during a commercial break in ITV's coverage of the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix.

The campaign was very successful both critically and financially. Honda's UK domain saw more web traffic in the 24 hours after the ad's television debut than all but one UK automotive brand received during that entire month. The branded content attached to "Cog" through interactive television was accessed by more than 250,000 people, and 10,000 people followed up with a request for a brochure for the Honda Accord or a DVD copy of the advertisement.

The high cost of 120-second slots in televised commercial breaks meant that the full version of "Cog" was broadcast only a handful of times, and only in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden. Despite its limited run, it is regarded as one of the most groundbreaking and influential commercials of the 2000s, and received more awards from the television and advertising industries than any commercial in history. However, it has also faced persistent accusations of plagiarism by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the creators of The Way Things Go (1987).

"Cog" opens with a close-up on a transmission bearing rolling down a board into a synchro hub. The hub in turn rolls into a gear wheel cog, which falls off the board and into a camshaft and pulley wheel. The camera tracks slowly from left to right, following the domino chain of reactions across an otherwise empty gallery space. The complexity of the interactions increases as the commercial progresses, growing from simple collisions to ziplines made from a bonnet release cable, scales and see-saws constructed from multiple carefully balanced parts, and a swinging mobile of suspended glass windows. Later sequences begin to make use of the Accord's electronic systems; the automated water sensors attached to the windscreen are used to make wiper blades start crawling across the floor, and a side door with a door-mirror indicator lowers the automated window to let a part pass through.

The majority of "Cog" takes place in complete silence, the only sounds coming from the collisions of the pieces themselves. This is broken with the activation of the CD player from the Accord, which begins playing The Sugarhill Gang's 1979 single "Rapper's Delight". The sequence ends when the button of an electronic key fob is pressed, closing the hatchback of a fully assembled Honda Accord Wagon on a carefully balanced trailer. The car rolls off the trailer, and stops in front of a tonneau cover bearing the "Accord" marque, while narrator Garrison Keillor asks "Isn't it nice when things just work?". The screen fades to white and the piece closes on the Honda logo and the brand's motto, "The Power of Dreams".

Honda's share of the European automotive market 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. European consumers perceived the brand as staid and uninspiring, and the cars to be of lesser quality than those produced by European manufacturers. In one survey, one quarter of respondents "wouldn't dream of buying a Honda as their next car". It was in this climate in 2001 that advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy proposed to Honda a new advertising strategy based on the company's Japanese motto, "Yume No Chikara" ("Power of Dreams"). The stated goal of the campaign was to increase Honda's share of the UK market to five percent within three years and to change the public image of the brand from "dull but functional" to "warm and consumer-friendly", all on a lower marketing budget than its predecessor agency had demanded.

The first series of promotions in the United Kingdom adopted the strapline "What if...?", and explored various "dream-like" scenarios. The first television campaign 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 and "Doodle", "Big Grin", and "Oblonger" for radio, became progressively more surreal, and featured oddities ranging from a traffic cone draped in leopard fur to trees growing traffic lights from their branches. In 2002, W+K Creative Directors Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth and creative team Matt Gooden and Ben Walker, proposed a new television and cinema advertisement to promote the seventh-generation Honda Accord line that had recently been rolled out in Europe and Japan. The advertisement, based on a complex chain reaction of moving parts from the Accord itself, was approved and given the working title "Cog".

Gooden and Walker had been working together since 1988. By 2002, their portfolio included a Guinness World Record-holding one-second advertisement produced for Leo Burnett Worldwide, and a depression-awareness booklet for the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust. Wieden+Kennedy approached Honda with a rough, low-budget 30-second trial film, inspired by 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, Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go).