Cog was created by the London office of Wieden & Kennedy, about the the 2 minute commercial, which uses "over 85 individual parts of the new Accord which precisely and intricately “knock on to” and interact with one another to form a complex chain reaction which lasts until the new Accord is finally revealed."

Not only does the entire process take place in real-time, but the final version is the result of one take. Creative Director, Tony Davidson commented, “watching people’s faces round the TV monitors during the shoot was like being at a football match. As the chain reaction progressed, people were egging it on to continue and do a perfect take. When something went wrong, it was like your striker blasting a really great chance over the bar.”

We asked Francesca Birch, the Honda Account Director, for some background on the ad.

Note: The car at the end of the ad is the stunning new Honda Accord Estate. For those of you who don't get to the UK enough, that's "Station Wagon" in British. Will the US get an "Estate" version? With a stick? We can only hope.

TechRevu: Whose (brilliant) idea was this anyway?

Francesca Birch: The idea was dreamt up by a creative team here at Wieden + Kennedy London, Matt Gooden and Ben Walker.

After more than 600 takes, was the final sequence one single take or a compilation of the best of many pieces?

Final sequence was one single take – although it had to be split into 2 halves as the room where we set up the whole sequence wasn’t large enough!

Who made it all work? Did Honda supply a team of engineers and mechanics to scope out the mechanical and electronic interactions?

We had a lot of meetings/conversations with Honda engineers and they came out to Paris for a lot of the preparation on the shoot. The final team who put the sequence together comprised of artists, engineers, sculptors and designers.

What did Cog cost? Can you give me an idea of how many people worked on it and for how long?

Cog cost approximately £750,000. The team was huge – over 20 people in total but a core team of approximately 8 people.

The script took a month to work on and then we had 5 months of preparation before the actual shoot which took just over 4 days.

What car, exactly, is it? When will it be available? What will it cost?

It is the new Honda Accord. It is available now to buy and costs from £16,500.

When will Cog air around the world? In the US?

At the moment Cog is only aired in the UK, but because of the huge amount of interest that has been generated in other countries it may still run in other countries – fingers crossed!

Fact Sheet (provided by Wieden & Kennedy)

Wieden + Kennedy London reveal new campaign for Honda’s new Accord:

On Sunday 6th April Wieden + Kennedy London’s new campaign for the Honda Accord breaks with a ground-breaking 2 minute spot in the middle of the Brazilian Grand Prix.

This spot is almost a year to the day exactly when W + K London revealed their new work for Honda.  Since the launch image ad, “OK Factory”, which communicated Honda’s philosophy and attitude, Honda have continued to run ads which have been built on Honda’s genuinely unique but little-known heritage and in doing so have injected joy, passion and imagination back into the car category and brought meaning and life to Honda’s slogan “The Power of Dreams”.

The new Accord campaign continues in this vein. It confronts head-on existing preconceptions about Honda by not only talking about the new Accord that Honda has just made but its approach to making it.

The new Accord has been received extremely well by the car industry and it is undeniably a superbly engineered vehicle that is positioned firmly in the quality sector and is well equipped to take on the likes of BMW and Volvo. The idea of “great engineering” has obviously long been the preserve of the German brands such as BMW and Audi, and with the new Accord, Honda wanted to show customers that the new Accord was just as well engineered as any of the German marques. However, what was particularly important was that “well engineered” did not come across as cold or dispassionate, as that is undeniably what Honda isn’t.

Rather, the challenge for Wieden + Kennedy London was to present “well engineered” in a way that was particular to Honda. As Kim Papworth, creative director at Wieden + Kennedy London explains, “we used the term “warm engineering” to describe the feeling that we wanted to get across with the new Accord. A term to describe the very precise and intricate way of Honda engineering but in the typically human, plain speaking, optimistic and honest way that is Honda’s tone of voice”.

Simon Thompson, Manager of Marketing for Cars at Honda UK, explained the approach: “Our advertising aims to show the public what Honda is all about – our passion for engineering, our ability to see things differently…on a human level. The advert celebrates a very Honda view of engineering, while at the same time using a beautifully precise style appropriate to the new Accord.”

The 2 minute commercial, entitled “cog”, uses over 85 individual parts of the new Accord which precisely and intricately “knock on to” and interact with one another to form a complex chain reaction which lasts until the new Accord is finally revealed. The ad therefore is a true example of “warm engineering”.

The process of achieving this intricate real life and happening in real time “domino effect” took over 5 months and involved a massive amount of testing and engineers, art directors, sculptors, and artists heavily playing a part from the very beginning. Setting up the chain reaction itself was impossibly frustrating. Just one thing going wrong would spoil the chain reaction and ruin the take. A total of 606 takes were shot until the perfect sequence was created. Creative Director, Tony Davidson from Wieden and Kennedy commented, “watching people’s faces round the TV monitors during the shoot was like being at a football match. As the chain reaction progressed, people were egging it on to continue and do a perfect take. When something went wrong, it was like your striker blasting a really great chance over the bar.”

The ad breaks on Sunday April 6 during ITV coverage of the Brazilian Grand Prix.

The ad was art directed and written by Ben Walker and Matt Gooden and directed by Antonie Bardou-Jacquet through Partisan.

The new Honda Accord Saloon is available from £16,495.  An estate version, the Accord Tourer, will be available from May.