Another car company using the medium to drive home the message is Mini. Last fall its global brand management division approached Toronto’s Taxi2 to develop a microsite to communicate new, greener technologies in the new R56 in a simple way. Taxi boiled down a fat binder of technical jargon and came back with ‘Minimalism,’ a stripped-down site that lets the user control the length of the message, from zero to 60 seconds, on four topics. ‘In the spirit of using only what you need, like the car does, you can hear as long a message as you’d like,’ says Taxi2 creative director Lance Martin. Or as short.
Jason McCann – who was associate CD on the project before moving to Taxi New York – says around 25 different scripts were written and 240 different sound files were recorded to make the site adaptable to the user’s whim. ‘In the interactive field, you strive for the mechanic to reflect the concept,’ he says. ‘Giving the user the freedom to choose how much time they wanted to spend with our content seemed like a nice way to hammer home the message of efficiency.’
The site, the first done by Taxi for Mini global, has been picked up in 21 countries, and Minimalism has been adopted as the umbrella term for Mini’s global fuel efficiency and CO2 reduction strategy. BMW Canada spokesperson Jochen Frey describes the play on words as ‘very different from the approach by other manufacturers.’ Test it at Mini.com/minimalism.
With files from Jesse Kohl
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