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A celebrity doesn’t star in Toyota‘s 2024 Super Bowl spot. It doesn’t spotlight the 2024 Tacoma’s new features, either. The ad is all about the truck’s grab handle.
Truck passengers hold onto the handle for dear life during the truck’s off-road adventures. They scream, swear and clutch the handle while along for a ride.
Toyota hadn’t planned to air an ad during Super Bowl 58, but its marketing leaders changed their minds when partner CBS Sports reached out only a few weeks ago with available inventory. Serendipitously, two spots Toyota planned to roll out during its new 2024 Tacoma launch campaign were available. One is a 30-second spot called “Dareful Handle” that’s set to air on CBS during the game. The other is 30-second ad “Undisclosed,” airing exclusively on Univision during the fourth quarter.
“In order to tell our story in this day and age, you have to be able to react to what’s happening in the market. If an opportunity presents itself, you take it, which is what we did,” said Michael Tripp, Toyota North America’s marketing vice president.
Toyota joins three other car brands in the game. Kia will tout its EV9; Christopher Walken stars in a BMW ad for the BMW i5; and Volkswagen will celebrate 75 years in America. American car brands that have been recent mainstays in the Super Bowl are sitting out the 2024 game.
In October, the National Football League made Toyota its Official Automotive Partner. The automaker also recently announced new national partnerships with Super Bowl-winning quarterback Eli Manning and current San Francisco 49ers star QB Brock Purdy. Toyota already planned to launch the Tacoma campaign this week, so when it committed to CBS, it opted to hold back two ads to air during the game.
“You’ll have people that love it, and the critics out there. It takes the simple truth of Tacoma in an exciting and inspiring way and tells a story about the truck and the Toyota brand on the largest platform of the year,” Tripp said.
Toyota agency of record Saatchi & Saatchi worked on the creative. Its most recent Super Bowl work for Toyota was its 2022 Super Bowl spots, “The Joneses” and “Brothers.” Toyota’s Hispanic agency of record, Conill, created “Undisclosed.”
