First thoughts on Yaris DIY

A month or so back I was asking about the Yaris DIY campaign, so I thought I'd share a part of the essay I happen to be trying to edit RIGHT NOW, AS THIS GETS READ ON THE INTERNETS. (In a few weeks, hopefully, I'll be able to share my crazy-ass findings about who planned the damned thing and what people got out of it. Hint: not as much as they should have.)

This is from my upcoming UNMARKETABLE, due out from The New Press whenever it gets done being written. It's the first sixth, maybe, of chapter five, and mostly concerns the non-DIY portion of the Yaris campaign.

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It is difficult to imagine anything less politically radical than a brand-new midsize foreign vehicle appearing on the market during a seemingly never-ending war over oil that raised gas prices to ridiculous highs. The team behind the Toyota Yaris nonetheless linked their latest model with do-it-yourselfiness anyway during the late summer 2006 promotional campaign Yaris DIY: Drive It Yourself. Borrowing a page from the Starbucks playbook—not to mention several of my compatriots in Chicago-based independent publishing and the national DIY crafting community along with it—the Yaris version of doing it yourself meant having cool kids from the underground show you how to do what they do, albeit in the context of the corporate-sponsored workshops: make hats, comics, and lampshades at home for very little cost. This is supposed to be the primary parallel: the low cost of their brand-new mid-size vehicle. And while the Yaris is surprisingly inexpensive compared to other cars (starting at a little over $11,000 MSRP for the 2007 models), as several Yaris workshop instructors may or may not have been willing to point out, buying one still costs more than a bike you can make from parts found in the garbage. The connection to the do-it-yourself community doesn’t end there, however. Like the hand-made wares you could purchase directly from their creators at the Renegade Craft Fair or DIY Trunk Show, this car is customizable, crafty, and hip. The Yaris Web site enthuses, “At YarisWorks DIY (Drive It Yourself) events there will be test drives (duh), hot music from indie artists cranking from the PA, and the opportunity for you (yes, you!) to decoupage a Yaris . . . quirky but fun!” (1) The links to crafters don’t end there, though. Actual links to DIY merch, made and sold by tried-and-true members of the DIY community, are all available here—just a few clicks away from the Toyota main page.

But for the people at Toyota, who did take a fair risk releasing a car line at the time that was clearly targeted to friends and supporters of the non-wealthy (although we will return to the question of audience and this campaign in chapter 11), literally co-opting the term for—and concept of—doing it yourself was not enough. They also needed to preempt how we might talk about the Yaris if truly left to do it ourselves: in the spring, prior to launching the line, the company paid Fox’s sketch comedy show MADtv to lampoon the car in an on-air skit. As a marketer who had worked on a similar project, getting a mobile phone company mentioned on Cartoon Network’s culty Aqua Teen Hunger Force, explained, “There’s no better way to say ‘you’re it’ than to have people parody you.” (2)

That probably was true at one time, although what the popularity-equals-parody equation fails to recognize is that, before culture jamming and copyfighting came along—two political art mediums based on image reuse—parody was the primary domain of Saturday Night Live, Mad Magazine, and National Lampoon. These all started out as plucky and edgy, but eventually became status quo corporate entities that chipped away at our notion of parody from the inside.

Recently, a “parody” of a Burger King ad ran on the cover of the Warner Brothers–owned Mad that looked just like an actual ad for Burger King (except that the Alfred E. Neuman face makes it cooler, and the image sits on the cover of the magazine instead of the inside). While it’s standard in some print publishing circles to sell ads on covers, or provide foldovers devoted entirely to advertising, integrating falsely parodic content into the cover image of a youth-focused magazine that many feel invented satire goes a few steps further than providing innovative ad space. Years ago, a Mad cover devoted to this same subject might have included a spoof name (Booger King comes to mind) and a disgusting rendering of the company’s advertised product featuring, let’s say, still-live animals, Grandpa’s teeth, and unidentifiable ooze, all in Harvey Kurtzman’s or maybe Wally Wood’s overly concise attention to grody detail.

Now, however, the “ad” and its “parody” are interchangeable. The Yaris sketch on MADtv aired when Toyota launched the car line—well before the name had time to enter the national consciousness, and thus well before a natural parody would have had time to evolve.

In fact, the last few decades of marketing campaigns have increasingly embraced fun-poking, lighthearted mocking, belligerent teasing, and outright dissension into promotional strategies—these last few paragraphs highlight only some of the most recent, and extreme, examples. MADtv’s Yaris sketch and other similar campaigns prove the viability of turning negative commentary into promotions. These advancements in marketing, while edgy, also serve to mute criticism and rob image reuse, which lies at the heart of protest acts of consumer awareness like culture jamming and copyfighting, of its unique power.

Yet critics of representational strategies like culture jamming and copyfighting have always seen this confusion. Culture jamming has often been said to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, and then provide the master with blueprints for a better house and better tools. Anticonsumerist books like Culture Jam and No Logo wind up inspiring new marketing strategies; a marketing manager at Pabst Brewing Company claimed that Klein’s book “contained many good marketing ideas.” (3) Or try putting the GoGorilla Media guidebook next to a copy of the zine how-to guide Sharpie Revolution: which is the marketing guidebook and which the underground, anticommercial how-to manual? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

It’s possible the corporate world is only aping our political leaders. Governmental propaganda has incorporated dissent into promotional campaigns. Politicians place themselves regularly and happily on nighttime talk-show hosts’ couches from Late Night to the Daily Show, knowing that if they appear to be laughing at themselves, they might help mute their opposition. Failing that, politicians will at least come off as edgy, an ever more important quality to the evermore targeted youth demographic.

Brandweek calls this technique “mocketing.” Regardless of the message conveyed, mocketing capitalizes on name recognition. “If being remembered is good enough, and if recall is what the brand hopes to achieve,” one research and marketing firm representative explained, “then [a mocketing campaign] would be a success.” (4)

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1. Snarky parantheticals in the original. Yaris Web site, http://www.yarisworks.com/drive_it_yourself.php (accessed September 13, 2006).
2. Laura Blum and Steve McClellan, “Companies Serious about ‘Mocketing,’” BrandWeek, June 26, 2006, http://www.brandweek.com/bw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=10027.... (accessed August 4, 2006).
3. Rob Walker, “Pabst Unsold,” http://www.robwalker.net. A similar version of the story appeared in the June 22, 2003, issue of the New York Times Magazine, although I found the version available on his site under the category “Journal of Murketing” (accessed August 4, 2006).
4. Blum and McClellan, ““Companies Serious,” quoting Barbara Zack, managing director and chief marketing strategic officer at IAG Research in New York.