A Good Idea Is Only The Start.

It's long been known that our ability to read exceeeds the speed at which we usually read. Last year, there was a lot of buzz around a speed-reading app called Spritz and, more recently, Honda sought to link the concept with their mechanical excellence in a series of three videos.
1.165 million views of the first video suggest that a lot of people enjoyed the demonstration of cognition speed and it is undeniably well executed.

But the 346,000 who viewed the follow-up didn't get what they could have got. The new experience is just the old one speeded up and that strikes me as a missed opportunity - both to expand the concept and, more relevantly, to deliver a second message to engaged viewers.


They might walk away from that impressed that cognition is even faster than they thought, but they might also have considered the possibility that the fact that they knew the message might have an impact on that subsequent cognition. I've no idea if that's a valid consideration, but it certainly crossed my mind.

It seems to me that if a different set of words had been introduced in the second ad, or incorporated into the first so that the two speeds were experienced without the need to click through to a second spot, then the impact would have been greater.

Good ideas are hard to find, but once you do it's worth asking how can we make this even better.