Third-party upload of the Cannes case film, so it may not last. Japanese with English subtitles. Turn the sound up, or none of this makes any sense at all.
Honda's brief was for Internavi, a connected car navigation service. The product records driving data. That is genuinely useful and completely un-advertisable, because "we keep a record of your journey" is a privacy policy, not a proposition. Nobody has ever felt anything about telemetry.
The insight is a piece of institutional memory rather than a piece of consumer research. In 1989, Honda's own on-board recorders captured Ayrton Senna's qualifying lap at Suzuka in the McLaren Honda MP4/5, then the fastest lap ever driven around that circuit. Throttle position, engine revs, gear, position on track, all of it. And Honda still had the file. Twenty five years later, a lap that no living person can ever ride in again existed as data, sitting in an archive, because an engineer once thought it was worth keeping.
Play the lap back on the actual racetrack, in the dark, using nothing but light and engine noise.
No car. No driver. No re-enactment. Just the data, made audible and visible, moving around Suzuka at the speed Senna drove it.
Dentsu Tokyo and Honda's engineers rebuilt the 1989 lap from the telemetry and mapped it onto the 5,807 metres of the real circuit. Speakers and LED fixtures were installed along the track. Then they hit play at night, with the grandstands empty.
The lights trace Senna's exact racing line as it happens. The engine note arrives from each speaker at the precise moment his car was at that point, at the precise revs he was pulling, so the sound rises and falls through the corners the way it physically did in 1989. Stand at Turn 1 and you hear him brake. You are not watching a re-creation of a lap. You are standing beside one.
The film that carries it is quiet and almost documentary, and the payoff is people who knew Senna, plus his fans, listening to it. That is the whole ad. A sound engineer's project, presented as a memorial.
The stupid: the client sells car navigation software. Respond by wiring six kilometres of Grand Prix circuit with speakers and lights so you can play a twenty five year old audio file to an empty racetrack in the middle of the night. There is no car in it, no product in it, no offer, no demonstration of the navigation system doing anything a customer would ever do, and the central experience is one that almost nobody can physically attend. Also, build the entire emotional payload on a driver who died in 1994, which is a line you had better be certain you can walk.
The smart: the data is the product. Internavi's actual argument is that recorded driving is worth something, and no chart, demo or testimonial can make a person feel that. So they proved it by storing something irreplaceable and then handing it back, which is the strongest possible version of the claim and is literally the service, performed at scale. It also could not be copied. Only Honda has that telemetry, only Honda has that engine, only Honda has that relationship with that driver. Most award work could have been made for a competitor with a find-and-replace. This one is welded to the client's own archive. And the treatment earns the Senna question: it is reverent, it is factual, it is the man's own performance rather than an actor's, and it is presented as preservation instead of borrowing.
The steal: before you brief a film, go through the client's archive. The most valuable creative asset most companies own is a record they kept for a boring operational reason and never once thought of as content.
This is our favourite kind of idea, the sort where the strategy, the technology and the emotion are the same object rather than three things bolted together. You cannot pull the feeling out and reuse it for another brand, because the feeling is made of the client's own data.
Also worth noticing: it is an ad whose primary channel is sound, at a moment when everyone else was pouring budget into visuals. The single best decision in the whole project was to not put a car on the track. A car would have been a re-enactment. An empty track with the engine still audible is a ghost, and a ghost is the only thing that could have made the point about what data preserves.
Straight talk. There is no published sales figure for Internavi tied to this, and we would not trust one if there were, because this is a brand act rather than a response campaign and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What is documented is the award record, which is unusually deep, and Honda's own confirmation of the project's technical basis. The 1989 lap was, at the time it was set, the fastest ever recorded at Suzuka. Senna died at Imola in May 1994.
Client: Honda Motor Co., for Internavi
Agency: Dentsu Inc., Tokyo
Source data: Honda's own 1989 on-board telemetry from Ayrton Senna's McLaren Honda MP4/5
Location: Suzuka Circuit, Japan
Launched: 2014
Honda Global, the Grand Prix announcement and the technical basis
Netimperative, the Cannes case study and the circuit build
D&AD, the awards entry
RACER, the motorsport read on it
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: