This Meta 2023 Toyota GR Corolla Ad Is Great Corporate Car Content
It’s rare that car ads take a look at themselves. This Toyota GR video ad goes so meta its basically a comedy sketch.
Car advertising has a wide range from “please buy this car for pennies a month” to the BMW M5 commercial with Clive Owen and Madonna. There are some excellent commercials and ads, but in the last few decades there have been very few, if any ads that break the fourth wall. This 2023 Toyota GR Corolla ad goes and makes fun of the suits behind the creative folks that make the commercials.
The premise of the commercial is simple: Toyota GR cars doing crazy shit. There’s drift driver Ken Gushi doing dirt donuts, drifting, and rallying in a cowboy hat, but then a wet blanket is put on the festivities by a suit-wearing executive. He asks “are we selling dust?” in response to the GR Corolla doing dirt donuts. Which, for anyone who has ever done donuts in dirt, know that they are extremely fun. But for a stodgy suit, who doesn’t understand fun, only understands the need to show the car.
In his infinite creativity, the suit then suggests that horsepower should be represented by horses. Very creative. Something that the production crew reluctantly does. But the gag continues throughout the commercial, until finally the executive’s assistant changes sides from boring corporate to supporting maximum crazy for the GR commercial. All it took was a gag I didn’t fully understand that involved drift driver Ryan Tuerck in disguise as an elderly woman in a ‘70s Corolla chasing fellow drift driver Sonya Klaus in a GR Corolla.
The commercial keeps getting crazier until the production team asks the stunt drivers for “more GR,” which means driving a GR Corolla on two wheels between a Supra and a GR86. But finally, the centerpiece of the commercial is a massive jump involving the GR Corolla. They used a real GR Corolla for this and it got positively destroyed.
Look, it’s rare that we praise an ad. But this one is pretty great and funny in the right ways. More of these, please.
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