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Fiat Toro Kite Shows Strength and Lightness Over Maricá
The "Kite" campaign is a 2019 Brazilian automotive film created by Leo Burnett Tailor Made for FIAT, dramatising the new Fiat Toro's combination of rugged capability and surprising lightness through a cinematic competition between oversized vehicle-branded kites filmed on location in Maricá, Rio de Janeiro.
Leo Burnett Tailor Made, São Paulo, conceived the campaign to announce the 2020 model-year Fiat Toro. FIAT Brazil formally presented the updated Toro in Recife on 5 August 2019, according to Motor1 Uol Com Br, and the campaign was published in Brazil that same month. The film grounds its storytelling in two parallel contests: on land, automobiles push through demanding road challenges, while above them, giant kites bearing automotive branding engage in a playful aerial battle. A kite shaped like a small fish loses to one shaped like a shark, and both are ultimately defeated by a towering sushiman — a comedic escalation that mirrors the Toro's own position as the vehicle that outclasses the competition.
The product proposition is precise. The 2020 Fiat Toro arrived with a payload capacity of up to one ton, 4x4 traction, and a seven-inch multimedia centre compatible with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. In the Brazilian market, where pickup trucks carry both utilitarian and aspirational weight, these specifications needed to feel simultaneously powerful and accessible. The "Kite" film answers that brief by keeping its visual language light and playful even as its underlying message centres on dominance. The campaign ran as a single film asset, placing the full burden of communication on one precisely crafted cinematic execution, and carries a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100.
Brazil's pickup segment was growing with measurable momentum at the time of the campaign's release. Brazil's total pickup market reached 342,700 registrations in 2019, up from 326,300 in 2018, representing five percent year-over-year growth, according to focus2move.com. Within that expanding category, Fiat held a commanding position: Fiat sold 141,800 Strada and Toro pickups in Brazil in 2019, according to focus2move.com, making it the dominant force in the segment and establishing the Toro as a flagship product requiring continuous competitive defence.
The competitive pressure was real. Volkswagen's Amarok and the Chevrolet S10 represented the primary challengers to the Toro in the Brazilian mid-size and lifestyle pickup segment. Against these rivals, FIAT and Leo Burnett Tailor Made needed a creative strategy that moved beyond specification-led communication. The insight underpinning "Kite" is that Brazilian consumers in the pickup category respond to vehicles that project strength without sacrificing personality. The kite metaphor resolves this tension elegantly: the Toro is the force lifting the contest into the sky while the narrative rewards wit and escalating audacity over brute force alone.
The campaign also arrived during a period of intensifying multimedia consumption in Brazil. According to zenithmedia.com, Brazil ranked among the leading markets in Latin America for online video consumption, making a single high-quality film asset a viable and efficient format for generating reach. Leo Burnett Tailor Made's decision to invest in cinematic production values rather than multi-asset fragmentation reflects a considered reading of both the audience and the platform environment in Brazil at the time.
Leo Burnett Tailor Made built the "Kite" film around a single sustained visual metaphor executed with cinematic ambition. The production was filmed on location in Maricá, Rio de Janeiro, a coastal municipality whose open skies and varied terrain provided the natural backdrop required to make both the road contest and the aerial kite competition feel credible and expansive within the same frame.
Creative director Tomás Correa, art director Fernando Lyra, and photographer Will Etchebehere are credited to the campaign, according to Publicinove Com Br and adsoftheworld.com. The creative team constructed the film's escalating narrative — fish defeated by shark, shark defeated by sushiman — as a deliberate comedic structure borrowed from Brazilian popular culture, where the logic of the food chain is a familiar and immediately legible joke. That cultural specificity is not incidental: it roots a technically sophisticated automotive film in a distinctly Brazilian sensibility, ensuring the Toro feels like a local champion rather than a global product localised for the market.
The craft choices reinforce the dual brand proposition of toughness and lightness. The ground-level vehicle sequences use the visual grammar of automotive advertising — dramatic angles, road textures, engine authority — while the kite sequences introduce movement, colour, and absurdist scale. The transition between the two registers is handled with tonal confidence, neither undercutting the product's seriousness nor sacrificing the film's playfulness. As documented on adsoftheworld.com, the campaign comprised a single film asset, which concentrates the creative ambition into one cohesive statement rather than dispersing it across formats. The result is a film that functions simultaneously as a product announcement and as a piece of branded entertainment calibrated for the Brazilian automotive audience in 2019.
No verified performance data for the "Kite" campaign is publicly available in terms of view counts, brand-lift scores, or sales attribution directly linked to this film. No trade-press reviews from outlets such as campaignlive.co.uk or adsofbrands.net documenting specific results for this execution have been located.
Structural analysis, however, points to a campaign built for durable effectiveness in the Brazilian market. The film operates on a clear emotional architecture: it establishes product credentials through the road-challenge sequences, then elevates them through the kite competition into a narrative that is memorable precisely because it is absurd. Memorability and cultural resonance are the two variables most reliably linked to long-term brand equity building in automotive advertising, and the "Kite" film pursues both with deliberate craft.
The broader context supports a reading of strategic soundness. Fiat's position as the volume leader in Brazil's growing pickup segment — a market that registered 342,700 units in 2019 according to focus2move.com — meant that the Toro campaign was defending category leadership rather than building it from zero. A film that reinforces emotional distinctiveness while announcing product updates serves that defensive purpose efficiently. The Leo Burnett Tailor Made and FIAT Brazil partnership, documented as spanning approximately thirty years by the time of FIAT's anniversary campaigns according to Grandesnomesdapropaganda Com Br, also provides institutional context: the creative confidence visible in "Kite" reflects a relationship with the depth to take tonal risks. The campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and cultural intelligence alongside limited documented reach amplification.
The "Kite" campaign is a 2019 Brazilian film by Leo Burnett Tailor Made for FIAT, promoting the 2020 Fiat Toro. Shot in Maricá, Rio de Janeiro, it uses a cinematic kite competition — featuring a fish, a shark, and a giant sushiman — to dramatise the Toro's payload strength, 4x4 capability, and playful brand character to Brazilian automotive consumers.
The "Kite" film was shot in Maricá, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The coastal location provided open skies for the aerial kite sequences and varied terrain for the vehicle road-challenge scenes, giving the single-asset film both geographic specificity and cinematic scale consistent with the Fiat Toro's positioning in Brazil.
Leo Burnett Tailor Made, São Paulo, created the campaign. Creative director Tomás Correa, art director Fernando Lyra, and photographer Will Etchebehere are credited, according to publicinove.com.br and adsoftheworld.com. The campaign was published in Brazil in August 2019 to coincide with FIAT's formal presentation of the 2020 Toro model.
The kite metaphor visualises the Fiat Toro's dual identity as a tough, capable pickup and an agile, modern vehicle. The escalating aerial contest — fish beaten by shark, both beaten by sushiman — borrows from Brazilian popular culture to make the Toro's competitive dominance feel locally resonant, humorous, and memorable rather than merely functional.
Fiat sold 141,800 Strada and Toro pickups in Brazil in 2019, according to focus2move.com, within a total pickup market of 342,700 registrations that year. The segment grew five percent year-over-year, according to focus2move.com, positioning the Toro as a category leader facing competition from the Volkswagen Amarok and Chevrolet S10.
The "Kite" campaign by FIAT and Leo Burnett Tailor Made receives a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative craft, a culturally specific Brazilian narrative, and confident tonal execution, alongside the absence of publicly documented performance metrics that would evidence the campaign's reach and measurable business impact.
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