Earlier this week, The Garage/Team Mazda’s “Driving Matters” campaign officially grew up.
The first chapter in the campaign, launched back in May, featured Jesse Pinkman narrating one protagonist’s life story in rhyming couplets as it leads to its inevitable conclusion: a convertible and a mid-life crisis.
The latest ad in the series, released yesterday, focuses on one aspect of that evolution as young man becomes young dad and faces the all-too-real struggles of trying to drive home from the hospital:
Like other follow-ups to the Aaron Paul piece, this one is less epically sentimental, and its SUV ownership/fatherhood parallel is more accurate than we might like to admit.
A couple of the earlier ads in the series are similarly light in tone and subject matter. Here’s “Superstrada,” which illustrates every driver’s not-so-secret dream (it got nearly three million views):
…and here’s “Stealing It,” which again aims to appeal to the adult male professional who would like to recall a youth that wasn’t nearly as cool as he likes to remember it:
Future entries in the campaign–which the client will use to sell all the cars in its lineup–will also attempt to make what Mazda VP of Marketing Russell Wager calls an “emotional connection, because in the purchase funnel, we’re way below the competition in measurements of opinion and consideration of our brand. ‘Driving Matters’ is meant to change that.”