Toyota’s Fastest Painted Website

Creative lab PARTY recently conducted an impressive media stunt in downtown Tokyo, titled the “Fastest Painted Website“, to promote a new Toyota concept car. A number of artists collaborated together to live-paint a billboard that became a working website in real time with constantly changing clickable elements as it came together.

A webcam filmed the progress of the painters from Japanese live artist crew Rinpa Eshidan, as they transformed the huge billboard infront of one of Japan’s busiest stations, Shinjuku station, into a work of online, clickable art. The whole process took around 8 hours to complete during which different elements became clickable, such as paint cans which when selected brought up the paint company’s own website.

The whole event was tied in with social media also in a digital and real world mix. In the bottom corner were two large Facebook and Twitter “bollards” which when clicked by users on the website in order to “like” or “tweet” about the stunt, caused the flashing lights to go off in real time on the ground at the station.

The finished work still features a large number of clickable areas that open everything from a BBC wildlife clip of wild leopard hunting to a black and white horse racing video, and different associated product’s home pages. All links although seem random do actually tie in the single theme of speed, as the promotion was to highlight the Toyota FT-86 concept car’s pace before it’s debut at the Tokyo Motor show earlier in the month.

The promotion was a fantastically creative and original idea which generated a fair bit of chatter on different social media networks. Blurring the real and digital worlds in live time created a particularly unique user experience by drawing people into the action as they explored the clickable elements that changed throughout the project. The end result was the launch of a live site that not only advertises the brand and product itself but also captured users attention in a way a simple site launch is incapable of, something that is hard to do today with so much online noise.