Toyota’s new US Christmas TV commercial tells a heart-warming tale of a young woman following in her grandmother’s footsteps.
And the star of the commercial? Not so much Toyota’s featured pick-up that the woman drives across the US – but a Pentax Spotmatic.
The commercial, released in late November to time in with the US holiday season, starts with the woman opening a box she’s just collected from a post office. She opens the box in the cab of her Toyota pick-up to find a collection of postcard-style prints in side…. and a Pentax Spotmatic.
“My darling granddaughter, when I was your age I was given this camera. May it capture your big, beautiful life the way it did mine. Love, grandma.”
The rest of the ad – which you can see below – sees the woman embark on a roadtrip, visiting some of the places captured in her grandmother’s photos and shooting her own films on the Spotmatic.
The advert finishes with her delivering an album of her own photographs to her grandmother, and the advert finishes with the message: “Give a little love this holiday.”
Film cameras are no strangers to modern advertising, with creative directors leaning on their aesthetic to help sell everything from glasses to secure ways to log in to your online bank account. But it’s rare for them to be such a focal point of the story.
The Pentax Spotmatic is, of course, a perfect camera to be used to convey carefree days back in the past. Pentax never aimed the Spotmatic series at professionals but at ordinary people interested in photography; their enthusiastic adoption by all four members of The Beatles in the mid-1960s only increased their popularity. The Spotmatic series had all manner of accessories and specialist lenses, but you could conceivably just head out on the open road with a Spottie and its standard lens, as the ad suggest.
“So we need to grab Spotmatics before the prices go insane?” asked one commenter on the Reddit group r/analogcommunity. Another Redditor said: “This makes me want to buy a Pentax more than it makes me want a Toyota.”
- Many thanks to Brett Rogers for the tip
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
Makes me want to go get a Spotmatic. And a Toyota pickup. And a dog!! Well, almost. At my age, I think I may be the grandparent in this scenario. And I already have a dog. And a truck. And far too many cameras. 😉
I love my Spotmatic SPII, great lenses (50mm f1.4, 135mm f3.5), easy to use, durable. What more do you need?
Over the years many well-known cameras (as well as less celebrated ones) have made their way into adverts for other products. Currently, Mont Blanc (a brand I’ve always associated with prestigious writing instruments) is using a Leica M7-wielding, leather-jacket clad Aston Martin driver (complete with dusty-cloud roads and against the light filming) to advertise its ‘Explorer’ fragrance for men. Interestingly, on the ‘Explorer’ fragrance’s own web page, there’s an image of another film camera (which I can’t identify but seems to have a hint of Zenit in it’s design). Given, enough time and interest there’s the making of a post… Read more »