Peter York on Ads: No 200 Daewoo Nirvana - I like morphing in my car

DAEWOO (or, as we've been taught to say it, Dayoo), the Korean car-maker, markets its unremarkable cars in singular ways. The commercial for the new estate is all in grey. With its Claymation figure-people and plinky xylophone jazzish music, it looks like one of those Euro art-film shorts that modern people love to spoof. And it also involves morphing - in this case, applied to clay, causing it to boil and bubble in a most diverting way, making it look like brain tissue.

Anyway, the theme of this most thoughtful commercial is moulding, the idea that Dayoo somehow moulds its cars round you and your family. (In reality, all this "moulding" seems to consist of is a service package - AA cover, three years' free servicing, warranty, and a courtesy car - rather than any extreme customisation of the actual physical car thing.)

The car thing starts life as a large egg-shaped lump of grey clay. As successive Claymation occupants get into it, bits of it morph - bubbling away - into car-shaped parts. This particular family has a mother, father, son, daughter, baby, dog and a football, all of them swallowed by the evolving egg. In the end, we get an empty estate car standing in what looks like a grim underground car park. "That'll be the Dayoo," says the voiceover proudly.

This marketing strategy has helped take Dayoo from zero - no, zilch- minus - in the UK market to having a real branded presence over a period of about five years. Since Dayoo's home market won't be that great for the next few years, it must seem like a real investment.