I’m actually taking a day off from both the day job and Dead Tree Media so I can participate in my annual birthday tradition of getting really drunk and then seeing how long it takes me to get thrown out of Disneyland. That said, I wanted to point out something I noticed last night while watching The Grammys.

Toyota is in some hot water right now because of a massive recall of almost an entire model year of cars thanks to a busted accelerator that they buy from someone else (BTW, just to be fair, Ford has one model it has to sweat as well, but I doubt it will cause as much damage).  Toyota pretty much wasn’t advertising right now… at least I can’t remember seeing much of anything out of them lately.

Then last night, not long after Pink completely blew me away with her aerial acrobatics while actually singing (btw, anyone that tries to lip sync a performance after seeing that is just a hack), but before Taylor Swift did almost an entire performance out of pitch, I caught what is actually one of my favorite commercials… dusted off and in the public’s face:

Again, I love this ad… it is everything that is right with the world of advertising right now.  However, it was put away for awhile because it had run its course.  The new model of the Prius hit the streets and most of the residents of West LA ran out and bought one… mission accomplished.

But then the shit happened with the accelerators and Toyota must have just freaked the hell out.  All it took was a call to the ad agency and a budget that could choke a horse and Toyota is back on the air again with a set of ads that no doubt made people all warm and fuzzy.

Well, I guess if you can’t fix the cars, you can at least try and fix the perception of the cars.

J.