The student winners from our New Talent Annual presented these beloved brands from a fresh perspective, taking the usual motifs found in car or horror streaming service advertisements and giving them new meanings.
“Drive Fun” (above) is a Platinum-winning campaign created by Talia Adler, a student from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, for the American car company Mini Cooper. To embody the car’s playful nature, Adler displayed the car models on various highways, only instead of driving, the car is shown slipping down a slide, climbing the monkey bars, and balancing on a rocking beam. Against the images’ “moody” backdrops of mountain peaks, a rolling landscape, and a city at dusk, the bright colors of the Mini Coopers and playground equipment stand out immediately, turning the typical car ad on its head by taking common visual motifs of hypermasculinity and sophistication often found in car ads and giving it an unexpected youthful twist. Each of the campaign’s images is fittingly paired with the tagline “Drive Fun”, making the playfulness of the Mini Cooper so visually apparent that these two words are all you need to understand what the campaign is all about. Although the campaign was a part of a class project, Adler received feedback from her professors that she pushed the boundaries on what a car ad can look like, daring to stray away from the usual portrayal of automobile advertising by highlighting how fun the car can be to drive rather than focusing on how “fast” or “durable” it is.
