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McGill Multimedia of Toronto programmed a mammoth interactive marketing kiosk with flash and function to attract younger car buyers to Toyota products.

The interactive touch-screen kiosk, designed for use at consumer auto shows, is a metallic marketing giant at 35 feet tall and 20 feet wide with six touch screens and monitors above so passersby can view what is being done onscreen.

When consumers approach the kiosk, they see a video loop of a cruising Toyota Tercel and the instruction, ‘Touch The Screen to Start.’

When the screen is touched, a 3-D ‘Welcome’ screen appears, which dissolves into a picture of a Toyota Tercel perched upon a platform.

Arrows pointing left and right on the bottom of the screen offer kiosk users six categories to choose from to design their own 1995 or 1996 Toyota Tercel, which takes, on average, between six and 12 minutes.

Participants are invited to customize the exterior of their own Toyota Tercel with colors, spoilers, bike racks, wheel rims, and so on.

When consumers have finished building their cars, they are given color printouts of their custom-made Toyotas.

Consumers can also use the kiosk to view video and 3-D animation of the new Toyota Tacoma, a sports utility truck.

But that’s not the end of it.

The kiosk contains a database that stores names, ages, sex and addresses (for future mailing lists) and numbers of ‘hits’ on particular options, that will be of use to Toyota’s marketing department.

The kiosk is used only in the u.s. at the moment, but is expected to be seen in Canada in the near future.

Details are not being released at this time.

According to Steven Koskie, marketing manager at McGill Multimedia, it all began when California-based Toyota called on agencies to submit ideas for innovative ways to market its product.

McGill Multimedia, which had already done work for Toyota in the past, brainstormed and came up with an interactive medium that allowed consumers to build a car on-screen. Toyota liked the idea.

Koskie says McGill Multimedia was charged with programming software and creating imagery that would target consumers in their teens to mid-20s and pull them away from the Ford Escort.

‘Escort was gaining a lot of territory because they were offering neat colors and fancy spoilers, and, Toyota, typically, wasn’t,’ he says.

‘[Toyota’s] objective was to come up with a car and options that would attract that audience and get them aware of the fact that they can get these options now on the [Tercel.]’

Koskie says it took four-and-a-half months in production to complete the project, a schedule that was a bit tight, ‘with just enough room to breathe,’ adding it would usually require six months.

McGill Multimedia took time to assess all aspects of the Tercel brand and the audience it would try to reach.

Koskie says, to start with, the Tercel is a small compact sports car of sorts, comparable with the Ford Escort, Mazda 323 and Mazda MX-3 – basically an economy-class car that can be dressed up with options.

The car appeals to a lower income level often associated with students.

As soon as the idea and identity of the Tercel brand were understood, McGill set to work on the creative and software.

‘Once you got the basic understanding of placement of objects and what had to go where, it was fine,’ Koskie says.

‘It wasn’t a highly complicated piece of machinery that had intricate pieces to put in place,’ he says.

According to Koskie, the creative and interaction was really enhanced by sound effects.

When a participant ‘clicks’ on a rim, for example, a ‘varoom, varoom’ sound is created.

Koskie feels the kiosk brings a new personality to the Tercel brand.

‘We created a new fresh image,’ he says.'[The kiosk] shows that Toyota is aware of the current market and the way people are looking for items to purchase.

‘There’s so much activity on online services marketing cars and brochures. It shows Toyota is into technology.’

Koskie says using this type of medium, the interactive kiosk, in building a car, eliminates the need to constantly hammer the brand name home.

The introduction and the option to print the consumer’s custom-made car both show ‘Toyota Tercel,’ but those are the only areas it is emphasized.

While it all sounds easy, Koskie says, the project was not all a smooth ride.

‘The biggest challenge technically was figuring out how to get everything to go on the car without having glitches,’ he says.

Creatively, it took a fair amount of time to ensure that the background and foreground maintained a consistent look so that the kiosk was appealing and appeared easy to use.

For example, Koskie says, with the background as a set color and 18 colors to choose from for the Tercel in the foreground, designers had to make sure no colors ‘clashed’ and that the car did not disappear if the body color matched the color of the background.

And Koskie says while the kiosk, as a marketing tool, is still relatively new, people’s expectations of the capabilities of interactive media are getting higher and higher.

‘Two years ago, we probably could’ve gotten away with not as much emphasis [on the creative,] but, today, now that consumers are becoming more aware of what’s going on in the interactive world, it’s becoming more of an issue,’ he says.

For those companies that want to get into marketing their products using kiosks, Koskie says they should keep the creative bright, and not exhibit too much information on a screen to avoid confusion and intimidation.

Above all, he says, when clients opt for a kiosk, they should take that extra step.

‘If you have the budget, expand it to something you can send off to a person’s house, or download from the Internet,’ Koskie says.

‘Have reusability of the content overall,’ he says, which was a road Toyota chose not to travel.