The Call Your Shot initiative is built around a simple but powerful idea: that the most remarkable thing you’ve ever done doesn’t have to be behind you. The campaign is actively championing Asian-Americans to boldly chase their goals, at any age, in any arena, at any stage of life.
Intertrend Executive Director of Strategy and Creative Matthew Choy, one of the architects of the Toyota Call Your Shot campaign, hopes it will move people who feel like their window has closed to reach beyond the extraordinary things they’ve already accomplished. Everybody, to me, hits middle age having already done something extraordinary,” Choy said. “Now’s the time you can do that next extraordinary thing.” That belief sits at the heart of everything Toyota’s Call Your Shot campaign represents. Across athletics, culinary arts, entrepreneurship, and entertainment, the campaign shines a light on Asian-Americans who are rewriting what midlife looks like. Not as a finish line, but as a launching pad.
Somewhere along the way, a voice crept in and told you that your moment had passed. Toyota’s Call Your Shot campaign is here to tell you otherwise. So to every Asian-American who has immigrated, rebuilt, sacrificed, and shown up, this one’s for you. You’ve already proven you can do the impossible. Now it’s time to call your shot again.
Tesia Kuh: The Call Your Shot initiative encourages people to define their own path and take bold steps toward their goals. What does that philosophy mean to you personally?
Matthew Choy: Call Your Shot was originally targeted for people of, dare I say, mid-age. I was doing the demographic breakdown and millennials fall in this, but also Gen X as well. What does Call Your Shot mean? For all of us to reach where we are in life, whether we’re immigrants, or working at a job, we’ve all had to really pour ourselves into something. Do something that was difficult but that really helped define our lives. Immigration’s a big one for me because to leave your home country and go to somewhere that you don’t have any friends or know very few people is this moment in time where it’s like calling your shot. It’s doing something that’s almost impossible when you look at it from the outside. Immigration is one of those big things that feel like you’re doing something that’s so impossible. People think sometimes when you get to middle age, that’s all you have. Like you had your one shot, and you did it. I’m in that boat too, that we can still do it. We’ve done it before, and we still have what it takes to do it again. We still have the ability to do what’s impossible.
My kids call me old all the time, but when I close my eyes at night, I still think I’m young, and I still think I still got it. That in all of us, that opportunity and chance for us to do the impossible again. This campaign is really about that. Not only do you still have it, but there are people out there that are just like you, doing the impossible still. We want to encourage that philosophy. The game’s not over yet.
TK: I love that. Many of your projects sit at the intersection of culture, storytelling, and brand collaboration. How did the idea behind Call Your Shot come together, and what message did you want it to communicate?
MC: So Call Your Shot is interesting. As I get older and I think about doing the impossible again, the first hurdle that you come to is the physicality of doing the impossible. I don’t know about your friend group, but my friend group, we’re all kind of older. All we talk about is health. All we talk about is, “What pill did you buy at Costco?” Or, “do you go to the gym enough?” 99% of the conversations will revert back to some kind of health topic. “Did you get the new massage chair because you have aches and pains?” Or something like that. So Asian-Americans people love talking about health. So we thought, when you’re calling your shot, the first place that you look to is this idea of physicality and do you have what it takes to do it again, so we start going down this road. LeBron James just had an amazing game, and he’s 41 years old, and he’s been playing in the league forever. So there’s a lot of people in their mid age still doing it. The idea of health, the idea of doing the impossible. All these things blend together to get to this project of Call Your Shot.
TK: The campaign highlights Asian-Americans across different verticals from athletes to culinary arts and entertainment. Why was it important for you to spotlight this story and this community as part of your broader initiative?
MC: Within our audience, physicality is where we started the conversation. But in different aspects of your life, you are still calling your shot. It’s like the chef who wants to open a new restaurant. It’s about the mother of two kids who wants to become an influencer. In our society, we’ve seen in different verticals outside athletics, people really making this Call Your Shot moment in their midlife. Of redefining what their life was all about. When you’re hitting midlife, you think your narrative is almost done, right? But Vera Wang did it way back when she became a top line designer in her late forties. And we’re seeing all these people really take hold of their own narrative and make it very different than the first part of their lives. So we want to highlight these things for these people, not just in athletics, but in culinary, entertainment. So this campaign will be highlighting a wide breadth of places where people decide to call their shot again. Maybe they’ve already done something remarkable in their life and now they’re gonna do the second act, which is maybe even more remarkable than their first act. I just love the narrative about it.
TK: Representation in sports and creative spaces has been evolving in recent years. How do initiatives like Call Your Shot help expand the narrative around who gets to compete and lead in these spaces?
MC: If I look back on life, you know so much more now than you knew before when you were first trying it for the first time, and now you take all that knowledge of what you know now and apply it to doing the next thing. It puts you at an even greater advantage than you’ve ever had before. The only thing that was missing is that inspiration to do it again. With this campaign, we hope to ignite that inspiration, to push people to that next level.
TK: Your work often blends culture and storytelling in ways that resonate with younger audiences. How does Call Your Shot reflect the mindset of a new generation that wants to challenge expectations and define success on their own terms
MC: I speak about this campaign from my own eyes, but if I were to see my dad do something or my mom do something amazing, I would be then inspired to do a similar thing. A lot of second-gen Asian-Americans in this country didn’t necessarily know how hard the immigration story was. They hear a lot about it from their parents, but they don’t necessarily know the grind of that. By watching your parents do something else or watching elders do something else, it really is an inspirational moment. If I were watching my dad run a marathon when he was in his forties, me as a young watcher, I would think “What the hell am I doing with my life?” I couldn’t even do that in my twenties, and my dad’s out here doing it in his forties. Maybe that’s something I can do. Maybe that’s something I can try and strive for as well. So there’s a big inspirational piece to this that is not age-related even.
TK: Looking beyond this campaign, how do you see storytelling continue to shape how brands engage with culture, sports, and communities in meaningful ways?
MC: The story is with this campaign and a lot of campaigns that we’ve done is how deeply you resonate with audiences. Sometimes it’s not the obvious ways. A lot of times when a company or people talk to us about messaging to Asian-Americans, they say “throw a dragon on it, make it red, and boom, you’re in Asian-American zone,” But as Asian-Americans, we know that there’s so much more to being Asian-American than just what’s stereotypical. Finding those next things that resonate is always gonna be at the forefront and what we strive to do and do it in a meaningful way. We have friends that that live in India, and the funniest thing they say to us all the time is that if you walk down a street in Mumbai, all you see is gimbap stands, people selling gimbap on the streets. And if I were to show you a campaign for Asian Indians that was premised around Korean food, you’d think that I was crazy. You’re only crazy until you understand the insight and until you understand the resonance of it, and then you stop believing that that’s a crazy thought. And so what we continue to do, to connect to these communities is take the unobvious and what may not be obvious to the general audience, but for the specific audience resonates deeply, is the greater trick in this. And a lot of this for Call Your Shot specifically, from the face you’d wonder, “What does that have to do with that?” But when you’re in that target market looking at this, you get that “Oh, that hits a little differently,” because the resonance may not be obvious, but it’s definitely there. So as we continue to look beyond this campaign, we’ll continue to hit that note with our target audiences. That’s what makes it special as opposed to doing the obvious.
TK: So how do you actually go in there and find those topics that resonate?
MC: The way to actually get that job done is to know the audience, speak to the audience, live in their shoes, not just talk to then across a clinic table kind of thing. You have to live in the house for a little while to start understanding it, rather than try to piece together pieces of research information and do it. That’s where the hard work is.
TK: For middle-aged Asian-American creators, athletes, and entrepreneurs who might feel hesitant about taking risks, what would you hope they take away from the idea of calling your shot? MC: You still got time. You still got the energy. Do it. The hardest step is always the first one, and it sounds so cliché, but I do think that it’s absolutely true. I can give you a quick story. When I was young, although I was Asian-American, I’d never been to Asia before, and I always wanted to go… but I already had a job, and I had all these responsibilities, rent and whatever. And one day I was coming home, and I saw this ad on a bus that I was on, it was a small ad. All it said is “Now’s the moment to go teach in Asia.” And I said, “Yeah, why isn’t now the moment to do that?” Mind you, I didn’t go teach in Asia, but I did go to Asia. But it’s kind of rhetorical, and that’s the power of advertising. People think it’s all about just selling someone a good, but sometimes it’s about inspiring people to do something different, and the power of marketing still has that. It’s changed my life, not just because I’m in the business, but it’s changed the trajectory of my life because I was affected by it as well. What we hope this campaign will elicit is people to feel hopeful about where they are and where else they can go in life, beyond the extraordinary things that they’ve probably already done. Everybody, to me, hits middle age, you’ve already done something extraordinary. Now’s the time you can do that next extraordinary thing. You still got it.
For Choy, the message is simple and it is personal. Midlife is not the end of the story. It is the part where you already know what you are made of, and that knowledge is the greatest advantage you have ever had. Toyota’s Call Your Shot campaign exists to remind Asian-Americans of exactly that. You have already done the impossible once, the only thing left to do is believe you can do it again. The game is not over. Not even close.
