Secret life of lawn mowers: New Nest ads solve bizarre household mysteries

For anyone who's ever come home to find a mysterious Honda Civic submerged in a backyard pool, there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, according to a new set of ads from Nest.

The Google-owned home tech startup cooked up a few scenarios in which everyday home life goes haywire as a means of advertising its new outdoor surveillance camera.

Those staged disasters were then mixed in with some real-life snafus captured by Nest customers.

Tapping into the same voyeuristic thrill as a Russian dash-cam clip, the found-footage-style videos range from the seemingly far-fetched (a palm tree-turned-Roman candle, a stray soccer ball that triggers a riding mower rampage) to the more predictable (costumed pranksters on a TP-ing spree, a careless mailman).

In each case, homeowners are left with a puzzling circumstance that might have otherwise gone unexplained.

"We wanted to avoid the cliches and scare tactics often used in security category advertising," Nest creative director Matteo Vianello said in an email.

"That lead us to a campaign that has fun and dramatizes the insight that there's no sense in having a security camera unless you see everything that happened."

The short online videos, which debut Wednesday, will be accompanied by print ads, billboards and web banners.

The connected-home gadget company launched its first outdoor camera earlier this summer to join its other wireless-controlled offerings like thermostats, smoke alarms and indoor cameras.