We’ve talked about automobile advertising here before on the ZRC blog, believe it or not, with the odious and hateful campaign Ford did for the Fiesta not too long ago.

Thankfully there are more enlightened auto companies out there, and Honda has a new ad series that features a remarkably open and tolerant depiction of the Differently Animated.

Unfortunately, some of the press on the subject has been abysmal:

Honda Civic Perfect for Zombies and Other Freaks RPA gets exotic in new campaign By Tim Nudd It doesn’t matter who you are—there’s a Honda Civic for you. That’s the message of RPA’s entertaining new ads for Honda, which broke Wednesday. To prove the point, they’ve assembled the most motley cast of Civic drivers imaginable. The five characters in the new campaign are: • The zombie, Mitch, a salesman who’s into high-tech gadgets. His Civic Sedan is loaded with options like Bluetooth HandsFreeLink and navigation system with FM Traffic.

Other ‘freaks’ include a Luchador, woodsman and a ninja. Adweek can go jump in a lake for all we care; the ads themselves are wonderful though.

I’m embedding the group ad with all five characters as well as the Zombie character’s longer individual ad. There’s a bit of slapstick humor but really the fact that the Zombie character IS a character, and what’s more, represents a demographic Honda hopes to tap into with a car, resonates deeply with the ZRC.

Zombies as valued consumers… we could get used to that. Economic power often fuels civil rights movements after all.

This ad campaign gets a hearty Zombie Friendly rating from The ZRC.

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, May 2nd, 2011 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.