There’s a difference between straight-up schmaltz and the subtle tugging of heartstrings, and the latest ad from BMW stays on the better side of that line.
“The Road Home,” created by agency Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, New York, is made up of what looks like cell phone-shot footage of a bunch of folks’ trips home for the holidays–and that’s because it is. 50 staffers from kbs+ recorded their own trips home for Thanksgiving on their preferred mobile device or personal camera. Footage was edited together and set to an original score and presented to BMW, which ran with it as a web film and TV spot.
Rather than lingering on the reunions for maximum emotional wallop–or, you know, the BMWs that might make such a trip possible–the main focus of the spot is on the joyful, luggage-handling details of the journey itself.
A tag at the end reads, “There’s no road like the road home,” but before it is spelled out in full, it is conveyed. Over the soft tickling of piano keys, the ad’s home footage is chockablock with little signifiers of a kind of trip that only takes place this time of year. From stuffed suitcases to the dogs coming along for the ride and the color of the leaves on a familiar street–all of it has a lived-in feel that should resonate with anyone who sees it air on NBC’s NFL Sunday Night Football the weekend before Christmas.