Toyota withdraws ‘sexist’ Yaris viral

In the subtitled, wartime lampoon of Toyota’s agency competition to create a video for the Yaris, there’s a line saying “How f*&*%&% hard is it to do a Facebook fan page, a You Tube viral or a Twitter account?” Very, as it turns out, Toyota has been forced to withdraw the real winning entry, branded variously as sexist, inappropriate and even incestuous.

At the beginning of the noughties, an advert like this wouldn’t have caused any ripples globally at all, it might have turned up on the Clive James show as a cultural curiosity and then forgotten. Ten years on and the combination of broadband, YouTube and social media means this advert has been subject to instant international condemnation.

Yet in Australia, they’re probably wondering what the fuss is about. The female copywriter, the director and the directors mum all said they thought the script for the ad was very funny and the panel of Australian Saatchi & Saatchi and Toyota executives who chose it as the winner obviously agreed.

Looks to me like they just had the wrong panel of judges, probably very senior executives with great experience in the Australian car market but no experience of the international dimension of viral video.

Here’s the offending video