Driven from distraction to action.
Promoting Mercedes-Benz safety feature ATTENTION ASSIST with a banner.
The Challenge:
The launch of the new E-Class revolved around several new features being integrated into the vehicle. While the client required an innovative new way to depict it, technical standards for banner creation at the time meant that only one image could be used in the banner to meet the desired file size.The Work
The Solution:
We decided that the creative should focus on one key feature of the new Mercedes-Benz E-Class. ATTENTION ASSIST. This feature ensures that drivers do not fall asleep behind the wheel. It provides an audible and visual cue if the car detects that drivers are veering away from course or are displaying potential signs of drowsiness.The creative depicts a cursor trying to draw a circle. The circle however never manages to be drawn perfectly because apparently the person drawing the circle is drowsy. You see the alert for ATTENTION ASSIST flash and the circle starts to be drawn perfectly. The circle then fades to the dashboard image which is where the alert is displayed in real life. The final frame of the banner shows the new E-Class in it.
The Experience
Project Diary:
Your attention needed!
How do you convey about a product feature that you really need to feel when you are behind the wheel. Perhaps the idea lay in re-inventing the wheel. Creatives can be the most hard-pressed for time and attention in an agency. So what if the designer of this so-called banner was falling asleep while drawing out the circle of the Mercedes-Benz logo. But that was a bit too sacrilegious to tamper with the company logo as such. So my Art Director and I decided to settle on the actual instrumentation dial which would show the product feature being activated.
We didn’t lose too many sleepless nights when thinking up this creative. The key challenge however was though we would have loved to use multiple images, we needed to tell our story using simple vectors to ensure that the file size was under a megabyte to satisfy our thirsty publishers.