Members of Municipal Waste and Exodus Shill for Scion in 6-Minute Car Commercial
Scion’s infiltration of the heavy metal space has been going more than five years strong with a whole litany of free shows, EP releases, video series, sponsored tours, limited edition vinyls, fine socks and more. The company’s strategy with regards to metal has been to take a background role, simply slapping the Scion logo on each project, surrounding it with some PR and marketing and calling it a day. That’s a pretty smart approach: whatever money they spent on getting those product out into the world was surely less than they would’ve spent reaching the same number of people via expensively produced television ads for their cars. Plus there’s the element of “cool” associated with it, for whatever that’s worth.
Until now, Scion has completely avoided attempting to hard sell their vehicles to metalheads by placing cars in their metal-oriented campaigns; they’ve been going for more of the soft marketing approach. So I was pretty surprised to see the below video, in which Municipal Waste’s Dave Witte, Exodus’ Rob Dukes and some other musicians I hadn’t previously heard of participate in what’s basically a highly-produced six minute commercial for Scion cars.
Did the Scion brass suddenly decide the soft approach wasn’t working and that they needed to sell some damned vehicles already? Or was this part of the plan all along: put a juicy worm on the hook to grab our attention, then reel us in for the kill? Kind of a long con, if you will. I don’t know the answer, but it’s a marked change in tack, and I wonder if it represents a shift in Scion’s strategy (come to think of it, I haven’t seen Scion’s name around the metal space much over the past few months) or it’s just a one-off.
Check out the video below. The Too Long Don’t Watch version is that a bunch of musicians race Scion cars around a track in the California desert and then yuck it up about “the rush of adrenaline” and blah blah blah who the fuck cares. Car commercial is a car commercial.
