Grrr: 'Irresponsible' Toyota speeding ad forced off road

The & Partnership’s big creative idea to promote the “heart-pumping excitement of the Toyota GR Series” has hit the hard shoulder after the ad watchdog ruled the press ad condoned and encouraged irresponsible driving.

The ad in question appeared in The Guardian and i newspapers in April and May this year, and featured an image of three cars driving close together along a road, with the headline “That GR Feeling”.

At the bottom, it stated: “Precise. Balanced. Playful. It’s this elusive combination that delivers the heart-pumping excitement of the Toyota GR Series. Pure performance cars, born from Toyota Gazoo Racing. And now on a road near you.”

But three complainants, including by the Worthing Green Party, rifled off gripes to the Advertising Standards Authority, insisting the ad encouraged dangerous driving.

In response, Toyota said that the GR Series was based on knowledge and technology developed through its Toyota Gazoo Racing brand. The firm claimed readers would be familiar with the common practice of vehicle models having names formed of a few letters or numbers, and for some models to have names derived from racing brands.

Toyota believed it would be tenuous to suggest that model names derived from racing brands could themselves serve to encourage irresponsible driving behaviour. It also thought readers would only read the “GR” in the headline “That GR Feeling” and elsewhere in the ad phonetically, as relating to the GR Series. The firm said the dictionary spelling of a growling sound was “grrr”, and that it was highly unlikely that readers would pronounce any of the iterations of “GR” in the ad as a growling sound.

It added the cars should not have been interpreted as racing on a public road and disagreed with complaints that readers would see the words “playful” and “heart pumping excitement” as a reference to irresponsible driving.

But the ASA took a different view. In its ruling it insisted that some readers would interpret the headline claim to be a play on words in that it also suggested a “grrr” sound, which they would associate with aggression and with the growling sound of a high performance engine.

The watchdog added: “We considered that the overall impression created by the ad was a suggestion that the high performance nature of GR Series vehicles meant that drivers of those vehicles could push the boundaries of safe and responsible driving and that it was desirable and enjoyable to do so.

“We concluded that in so doing the ad condoned and encouraged unsafe or irresponsible driving.”

Banning the ad from running again in that format, the ASA also warned Toyota about its future activity.