Pointed Ads : Hyundai TV Campaign to Target Twentysomethings
Confident that its Korean parent has conquered quality problems that have plagued its vehicles for years, auto importer Hyundai Motor America is launching an advertising campaign with an attitude next week.
Hyundai’s television ads--the company’s first full-court press on national network programs--are aimed at “Generation X” buyers: the twentysomething crowd that doesn’t have a lot of money to blow on status symbol transportation.
The ads will use an irreverent sense of humor to poke fun at the status quo while suggesting that Hyundai is the only sensible alternative to what the Fountain Valley company’s sole print ad calls “overpriced Japanese cars.”
To stretch its ad budget to cover a major television campaign, Hyundai is scrapping almost all print ads after Dec. 31.
The concentration on network television is Hyundai’s bid to “pitch the brand” to a much broader audience than in the past, said John Noble, president and executive creative director for Hyundai’s Irvine-based ad agency, BSB West, a unit of Backer Spielvogel Bates Inc.
It is a tactic that was tried and abandoned last year by Nissan North America Inc., which returned to a mix of print and television ads after an all-TV campaign failed to bolster slumping car sales.
In Hyundai’s case, however, the ads promote a brand that is not nearly as well known as Nissan. Noble argues that Hyundai can’t effectively advertise its individual models until people are comfortable that they know what a Hyundai is.
The ads attempt to sell the brand as a good-looking, reliable, well-equipped and low-priced vehicle for the recessionary 1990s.
“We’re conveniently located 6,587 miles east and thousands of dollars south of Japan,” says the print ad.
One of the new television ads parodies the recruiting scene from the hit film “The Firm,” with an obviously well-heeled lawyer telling a young recruit that he can have a fabulous salary, unlimited use of the condo in the Barbados “and any color Hyundai you want.” Leading the stunned young man to an office window overlooking a parking lot jammed with Hyundais, the older lawyer says the firm didn’t get to be successful without being sensible too.
But money isn’t everything to a generation that has embraced “Wayne’s World” and “The Simpsons,” and has helped make New York radio personality Howard Stern a nationally recognized celebrity.
So the campaign also includes one mildly risque television spot.
In it, two well-dressed career women are wondering aloud what anatomical inadequacies are being compensated for by the male drivers of several expensive foreign sports cars when their attention is diverted by the handsome driver of a Hyundai Elantra.
“I wonder what he’s got under his hood,” one woman asks, as “Jurassic Park” co-star Jeff Goldblum’s voice-over suggests that “if what they say is true about men who drive flashy cars, then if a man chooses a car because it’s solid, well-built and lasts a long time, wouldn’t the opposite be true?”
N. Douglas Mazza, Hyundai Motor America’s chief operating officer, calls the new campaign “a coming-out party” for the company. “The ads have no apologies in them.”
