Honda finds a groovy new way to pitch products: the musical road

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  Z.S. Grant

Ken Gibson can tell you that it's a little eerie to hear the "William Tell" overture float through your bedroom window at 2 in the morning.

He first thought the noise was a neighbor playing a xylophone. His neighbor was convinced it was a ghost. Across West Avenue K in Lancaster, where the flat brown desert rises up into purple mountains, two others thought the noise was the high school marching band.

They all soon learned that the tune was coming from a musical road installed by Honda Motor Co. designed to play the overture when Honda Civics and other cars drove over it, as part of a marketing campaign targeting younger folks. The first musical road in the U.S. is featured in Honda commercials that began Sunday.

Musical roads are new to Lancaster residents, but there are already a few "melody roads" in Japan. One plays a pop song. A musical road in South Korea plays "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

The roads feature intermittent grooves similar to rumble strips on highways. The grooves are spaced so that a series of pitches play when a car drives over them: Honda's road was designed for a Honda Civic driving 55 mph but made a noise resembling Rossini's famous opera overture when other cars rumbled over it as well.

In Lancaster, the road attracted tourists from across the country and inspired dozens of YouTube videos, some filmed in the dark. People drove on it repeatedly to hear the noise, which sounded like the distant warbling of horns. Some even drove in reverse to see whether the song would play backward. (It did not.)

"My kids loved it," said Michael Beck, an aircraft engineer who lives near the road. "They kept making me drive over it again and again."

For Honda, the idea behind the musical road was simple: The company wanted its ads to stand out against the other car commercials that pushed fuel efficiency, gas mileage and other standard features ad nauseam.

"We saw that the industry was getting really congested in this segment with fuel efficiency advertising," said Jeff Moohr, management supervisor of the Honda account at Santa Monica ad agency RPA. "We challenged the creative team to do something different, and something youthful that only a Civic could do."

But constant repetition of the overture -- the music associated with "The Lone Ranger" radio and TV series -- can become irksome. Although some residents of the (usually) quiet neighborhood thought the music was great, others thought it got old quickly.