Roy and TOTO

A bit of a random post, but an interesting thought nevertheless…

I’ve been noticing various iterations of this ad on bus-stops around Shanghai over the last couple of months. Generally, it caught my attention because of the cyborg figure, I’ve got a bit of a penchant for mannequins and cyborgs - and the ad reminded me of the work of artist Hans Bellmer and the excellent Chris Cunningham video for Björk’s video All is Full of Love.

I was surprised to find out that this a piece of communications for high end bathroom brand Roy, who are official sanitation sponsors for the Expo. The visual language is not the kind of advert you would expect from a bathroom manufacturer, though Roy do produce high-tech appliances, which goes some way to explaining the imagery. More interestingly, this led me to think of another high-tech bathroom brand who produce interesting communications, TOTO.

For a couple of years TOTO have sponsored Monocle magazines weekly podcast series. It’s a shrewd move from a brand who are known for future facing and design driven technology to engage with an style focused audience in a publication that espouses lifestyle and aesthetic values throughout their magazine. I imagine the kind of international aesthete Monocle targets is exactly in line with the core TOTO consumer demographic.

So, nothing more to say than it’s pleasantly surprising to see such initiatives and interesting iconography from bathroom manufacturers, especially given advertising for the FMCGs people put in their bathrooms are often much more generic and less engaging…

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 7:23 pm. It is filed under Advertising, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.