Toyota Yaris

A friend of mine in Australia Laurel Papworth really castigated Toyota and their Yaris social media innitiatives .
http://laurelpapworth.com/australia-toyota-yaris-social-media-campaign-downfall/
Toyota have chosen 5 or 6 agencies and have asked them to spend $15,000 each on a “social media marketing campaign”. Think “stunt” and you have a better idea of what they are talking about.. And while traditional media pitches means war to get content into banner ads, on TV and radio, when it comes to using the same tactics in online communities, there’s damage done. What happened to engagement, respect, conversation, collaboration, dialogue?


Here is a video she created showing her displeasure;



My comments are;
Hey Laurel, first you castigate companies for not 'experimenting' and then when Toyota only throws $100,000 at a test project you castigate them for doing it wrong........

I think it's cool that Toyota are trying something innovative, and sure i think Yaris cars suck and nothing would make me buy one..... doesn't mean something cool isn't going to happen from one of them.

Personally i love the One Green Bean concept, i think it should be run for more than just one night....maybe something like you find the car via a mobile web app and you get to keep the keys as long as you are driving it, once you "drop the keys" someone else gets to take the car to where they want.....would be a great example of Toyota reliability having the car on the road for 24x7x30 days etc. you could have a dashboard where it tracks how many kilometers per day, how fast it was traveling on average and a map showing the trip route etc.

What do you think? is $100k a joke or a reasonable 'experiement'?

Cheers,
Dean