'We just pulled the Shuttle through Los Angeles'

I guarantee this is the coolest thing you will see this week.

Check the video embedded below, (email and RSS subscribers will have to click through), describing the final leg of the upcoming journey of retired Space Shuttle Endeavour to its new home, the California Science Center in Los Angeles, as part of NASA's winding down of the long time shuttle program. 

I told you that was pretty cool, right?

And what makes it so cool from a marketing/branding perspective, is that the (essentially) stock Toyota Tundra pickup truck will tow the massive payload, in front of an enormous audience, and in a manner that is shockingly more relatable than just about every other advertisement you'll see for similar trucks.

Most truck marketing and advertising consists of showing the trucks doing incredible, trained professional driver, closed course, dramatization-don't-try-this-at-home stunts that might make for fun TV commercials but don't do anything to actually communicate to the average user the real capability and practicality of the vehicle. And I get that if all ads simply showed pedestrian and utilitarian applications, consumers would get bored, but does a dramatization of a truck launching from a ski jump and barreling down the side of a snowy mountain convince anyone it is the right vehicle for picking up mulch at the Home Depot?

A write up of the Tundra-Endeavour project on the Graphicology blog says it better than I can:

The Shuttle Shuttle is a once in a lifetime event and Toyota is taking advantage of it in a way that isn't terribly obvious (ie: it doesn't commercialize the experience too much). They could single-handedly put an end to an entire genre of television truck demos. If Chevy or Ford shows an ad of their trucks pulling something heavy, all Toyota has to do is point to this. "We just pulled The Shuttle through Los Angeles." Way, way more dramatic and convincing than anything the other manufacturers could tow behind their rigs. Sure, there is a special setup and trailer that is being pulled which makes the whole thing feasible, but that's not something the public will focus on. All they will see is a Toyota pulling a Space Shuttle. And for a brand, you couldn't make this up.

Really cool story and cooler message. You can talk about doing incredible things. You can create some kind of faux reality where amazing things happen, (think every beer commercial you have ever seen during the Super Bowl broadcast), or you can actually do incredible things, and in a way that are understandable and relatable to your audience.

What do you think people will remember?