Toyota Get Paralympic Advertising Right

Our international Ad Of The Week this week was an Australian commercial which had gentle fun with one of the most common tropes in Olympic ads – the glimpse into an athlete’s childhood. In that piece we talked about how these ads are a cliche, but the reason they’re a cliche is that they work. It really is inspiring and emotional to see an athlete develop from a determined kid to a world-beater, and Toyota proves it with this commercial focusing on Paralympian Marissa Papaconstantinou, a Canadian runner.

But Toyota’s ad is far from just a formulaic tour of familiar tropes. It puts its own fresh spin on the idea, first by having Papaconstantinou run through the whole ad, from the moment she gets her first prosthetic fitted to her triumphant race to the finish line. And second by having her gradually pick up fellow runners, representing all the people who’ve helped and inspired her on her own journey. “We believe no journey is taken alone”, the ad says, underlining this theme.

The explicit link to Toyota is its Olympic sponsorship, but the ad projects values of support and care – positioning Toyota as a company that cares about its customers. It’s a stylish, well-executed ad which communicates its meaning well and provokes rising happiness across the ad, while the constant motion makes it feel positive and dynamic.

As a Paralympics ad we decided to test the commercial not just with a nationally representative audience but with a custom sample of people with disabilities. In our Feeling Seen USA report we outlined the reasons that advertising showcasing diverse groups and their contributions works so well – they inspire the general population but also have the potential to perform even better among the group in question, an effect we call the “Diversity Dividend”.

The diversity dividend is not always easy to achieve, and this is particularly true for ads starring people with disabilities. For one thing, disability covers a wide spectrum of life experiences and conditions, but more importantly there’s often a tonal clash between how brands like to portray disability and how people with disabilities perceive themselves. It’s common for brands to show disability either from the perspective of able-bodied people making an effort to be inclusive, or treat it as an obstacle to be overcome. Both these approaches can turn off people with disabilities, who simply want to see their lives on screen without being condescended to. So some of the disability-centred ads we looked at in Feeling Seen USA actually scored lower among people with disabilities than the general population.

Toyota avoid this pitfall. There’s no sense of Papaconstantinou as needing to overcome hardship and the ad is firmly centred on her and her achievements. It’s an ad which includes disability without making it the exclusive focus: you can easily imagine exactly the same ad made with any Olympic runner. Similarly, the message that we all need support, and what we achieve owes a lot to others, is something every viewer can recognise.

So the ad scores a good 3.8-Stars among the general population, and a strong 4-Stars among people with disabilities – a small increase but notable because of the many ads which fall to get any kind of diversity dividend in this group. Toyota’s inspirational ad is full of life and motion and another example in what’s been a strong summer for sporting ads.