Toyota seemed to have been trapped in a vortex of plain, wanna be humorous advertising campaign initiatives throughout the past months. Just take the Prius C, or the Yaris campaign featuring Michael Showalter for example. They just decided to show off the cars’ features and wrap it up in a, let’s say, acceptable format. Not so impressing, don’t you think?

Maybe it’s just me, but I really like when brands take a product they want to advertise, extract it’s strongest property, and then figure out a way to present that property in a subtle, yet undeniably clear way. And that is exactly what Toyota Belgium, in collaboration with the creative agency Happiness Brussels, managed to do in a new campaign for Toyota iQ.

iQ is Toyota’s smallest model, and is is pretty much as small as a car can get. So obviously, the small size is it’s most prominent property, but how to present it as an advantage? Doing something similar to Prius C and Yaris campaigns just wouldn’t do the trick. Well, Belgian towns and cities just happen to have very tiny streets, and Google, after deciding to introduce their Street View project there, had problems in recording the narrow roads and passageways, so they’ve left most of them blank.

Happiness Brussels connected the dots, equipped an iQ with a 360° camera, and the “iQ Street View” project was born. They started recording the streets where the Google car was too big to fit in, and even engaged the Belgian public through a specialized website, where people can tag the streets that have been left blank by Google. Ingeniously straight to the point – just the way all advertising should be. Take a look at the promotional video below, and see how the project was born:

“iQ Street View” campaign is due to be finished by the end of the year, when all the data will be passed on to Google to be included in the official Street View project. Great job Toyota (and Happiness Brussels), great job.