yaris (again)
Now to whinge.
Martha mentioned how much her boys enjoyed that new Toyota Yaris advert, and I thought I’d try it out on my girls too.
They loved it. I had to loop it to keep them happy. “Crash! Bang!”, said Rosa happily, while her other sister just giggled all through (the micturition scene passing them by).
But it wasn’t exactly easy to obtain a copy of the video to use offline. I had to snarf the URL of the .flv file by using LiveHTTPHeaders on Firefox; download it and then play it in a dedicated .flv player (as my usual .flv player, VLC, didn’t seem to work on streamed .flv files). It seems that Toyota want us to stream this video, not download it – except that streaming for me is a pretty stop/start affair even though I’m on broadband. (And the nice people at BestAdsOnTV.com seem to have set up their webserver to make difficult deep-linking of their movie files by redirecting any page hit that carries a referring URL to their home page – I can sympathise with them to an extent so I won’t post the precise URL of their version of the file here – so I couldn’t easily use their alternative source for the movie file.)
Why oh why is this so hard? (A question for Toyota webmaster other-Alan, who drops by on a semi-regular basis.) Why not offer a super hi-res version for download? What purpose is served by enforcing streaming?
Katja
3 February 2006, 08:50 #
Hard? The movie wasn’t showing in either of my browsers, I only heard a catchy bit of music. This song made me even more curious than your post and Martha’s comment already had, so I tried to think of another way to see the advert. I looked in Opera’s cache, and there it was! After moving and renaming the file, it played perfectly with Quicktime Player.
Oh, and here’s another one for your car advertisements collection.
Alan
3 February 2006, 18:08 #
I was able to capture it as well (eventually), but the average person searching for “yaris tv advert” wouldn’t be able to I don’t think. And the version that’s playable with Quicktime isn’t even the actual official Toyota one…
That Civic ad is pretty cool…
other-Alan
7 February 2006, 10:22 #
Hi all, unfortunately there are licensing issues about how we may distribute those tvc’s, which is why the Marketing guys make it hard to download. :-(
Personally I think it would be a good idea to have a decent res version – but I dont make the decisions, just panic about the bandwidth being gobbled up :-)
Alan
7 February 2006, 19:42 #
I can imagine. The bandwidth would be enormous.
And Marketing – it’s the same everywhere. They’re there for a reason, but so often they get in the way of having fun…
other-Alan
8 February 2006, 08:21 #
The Bulls flash game + Ad hit us the most for bandwidth, over 3Gb/day :-( As for marketing, I can’t complain, they do do some pretty cool/fun stuff. (The Hilux ad’s, for example, are classics)
Some Guy
26 February 2006, 13:28 #
You can always go to the website of the Agency that produced the Yaris spots to download a hi-res quicktime. http://www.saatchi.ca
Look under work, and you’ll see the Soccer ball one!