Cog (advertisement)
Honda Accord Euro | |
Release date(s) | 6 April 2003 (television) |
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Directed by | Antoine Bardou-Jacquet |
Music by | The Sugarhill Gang ("Rapper's Delight") |
Starring |
|
Production company | Partizan Midi-Minuit |
Produced by | James Tomkinson |
Country | United Kingdom, Australia, Worldwide |
Budget | £1m (production)[1] £6m (campaign)[2] |
Preceded by | "Play" |
Followed by | "Sense" |
Official website | http://www.honda.co.uk |
"Cog" is a British
The campaign was very successful both critically and financially. Honda's UK domain saw more web traffic in the 24 hours after "Cog"'s television début 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.[3] However, it has also faced persistent accusations of plagiarism by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the creators of The Way Things Go (1987).[4]
Sequence
"Cog" opens with a
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
Production
Background

Honda's share of the European
The first series of promotions in the United Kingdom adopted the
Pre-production
Gooden and Walker had been working together since 1988. By 2002, their portfolio included a
The Honda executives were intrigued, but demanded a cut using actual automotive parts before giving permission to go ahead with the full-scale project.[11] "Cog" was approved with a budget of £1 million, and Gooden & Walker recruited a London-based team to go through the logistics of the shoot in detail.[1] The team, which comprised engineers, special effects technicians, car designers and even a sculptor, spent a month working with parts from a disassembled Honda Accord before the design for the advertisement's set was even finalised.[9][12] Approval for the script took another month. Honda insisted that several specific Accord features, such as a door with a wing-mirror indicator and a rain-sensitive windscreen, appear in the final cut. The company planned to highlight these features in sales brochures.[13] Antoine Bardou-Jacquet was hired to direct the piece.[9] Bardou-Jacquet was mostly known for directing several award-winning music videos, including Alex Gopher's "The Child", Playgroup's "Number One", and Air's "How Does It Make You Feel".[14][15]
Filming
Bardou-Jacquet wanted to compose the advertisement with as little computer-generated imagery as possible, believing that the final product would be that much more appealing to its audience.[16] To this end, he set two months aside for the creation of hundreds[17] of conceptual drawings detailing various possible interactions between the parts, and a further four months for practical testing and development.[12] For the testing phase, the script was broken into small segments, each comprising only one or two interactions. Ideas deemed unworkable by the testing crew, such as airbag explosions and collisions between front and rear sections of the car, were abandoned,[9][17] and the remaining segments were slowly brought together until the full and final sequence was developed.[17]
The final cut of "Cog" consists of two continuous sixty-second dolly shots taken from a technocrane, stitched together later in post-production. (The stitching appears during the moment when the exhaust [muffler] rolls across the floor.)[18] Four days of filming were required to get these two shots, two days for each minute-long section.[17] Filming sessions lasted seven hours and the work was exacting, as some parts needed to be positioned with an accuracy of 1⁄16 inch (1.6 mm). Despite the detailed instructions derived from the testing period, 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.[19] Between testing and filming, it took approximately 100 takes to film the commercial. (Rumors about 606 takes were later debunked.)[20] The team commandeered two of Honda's six hand-assembled Accords—one to roll off the trailer at the end of the advertisement, the other to be stripped for parts.[2] While several sections of the early scripts had to be abandoned due to the total unavailability of certain Accord components, by the time production finished the accumulated spare parts filled two articulated lorries.[2]
Post-production
"Cog" needed only limited post-production work, as the decision had been made early on to eschew computer-generated imagery wherever possible. To further reduce the work required, "Barnsley", a specialist in the
Release and reception
Schedule
"Cog" was first aired on
The full 120-second version of the advertisement aired only 10 times in all,
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.[8] This combined with Honda's use of different advertising agencies in different regions and the relative autonomy of its various business units in marketing decisions,[1] meant that "Cog" screened in only a few selected markets: the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia;[19] 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, or in one of a handful of unsolicited and unpaid broadcasts on news channel review programmes.[8][29] Traffic to Honda websites quadrupled; in the first few weeks, "Cog" was downloaded by over a million people. By mid-May, the number was twice that.[30] It has been estimated that more people in the United States voluntarily chose to watch "Cog" than any other Honda commercial.[31]
In financial terms, "Cog" was an unprecedented success for Honda. The £32,000 spent on placements on the
Media reception
The media reaction to the advertisement was equally effusive;
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. The film was well known in the advertising industry and its creators had been approached several times with offers for the right to use the concept, but had always declined. The letter pointed out several similarities between their work and "Cog", and warned the agency that they were considering legal action on the basis of the "commercialisation and simplification of the film's content and the false impression that [they] might have endorsed the use".[34] 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.[35] Media publications quickly picked up the story, and asserted that Fischli and Weiss were already in the process of litigation against the car manufacturer.[35][36][37]
Comparisons were made between the case and that of
Awards
List of awards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Despite the lingering shadow of these accusations, "Cog" drew an unprecedented amount of critical acclaim. It received more awards than any commercial in history;[14] so many that it was both the most-awarded commercial of 2004 and the 33rd-most-awarded commercial of 2003.[49][55] The jury for the British Television Advertising Awards gave the piece the highest score of any commercial ever recorded; the jury's chairman Charles Inge commented: "My own opinion is that this is the best commercial that I have seen for at least ten years."[43] 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."[56]
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
The result at Cannes was a surprise; after the longest judging period in the festival's history,[59] 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.[59] Chief among speculated reasons for the outcome was the plagiarism debate surrounding "Cog".[61] Ben Walker told 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."[10]
Legacy
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 space. The first of these was Just Works, a deliberate parody advertisement for the
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. Wieden+Kennedy were pleased to gain the extra publicity and Neil Christie, managing director of Wieden+Kennedy London, commented: "We are very happy that every time the BBC runs one of their adverts, the person who watches it thinks of Honda."[61]
Outside advertising
"Cog" has also inspired a number of other creative endeavours outside of the advertising industry, including an elaborate domino toppling world record attempt by Robin Weijers,[69] and a three-minute introductory trailer to the BBC show Bang Goes the Theory.[70] In 2004, the United States Coast Guard Training Centre in California requested permission to use the ad in its training regime as a demonstration of the importance of attention to detail.[71] Discussion of "Cog" as an example of the confluence of art and advertising, and as an example of inspiration versus plagiarism, has been ongoing. Mark Leckey included "Cog" as part of his video art installation "Cinema in the Round", in the Tate Britain gallery, London, in 2008.[72] It was also the focus of a panel discussion at the Tate Modern during a retrospective of Fischli & Weiss' work there in 2006.[73]
The next piece created by Wieden+Kennedy for Honda, Sense, advertised the company's "
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External links
- Cog
- "Cog" – via W+K website
- Derivatives
- BBC Radio homage – via YouTube
- Making of the BBC Radio homage – via YouTube
- Tipping Point – via Boards website