Yesterday’s Super Bowl is far from the only tentpole sports game on marketers’ media plans.
Take Hyundai, which is making live sports a cornerstone of its paid media budget this year, without the Super Bowl. Hyundai sat out the Super Bowl this year due to product launch timing, said Sean Gilpin, CMO of Hyundai Motor America. But skipping the Big Game also allows Hyundai “to invest consistently in a wide range of sports,” he said. Gilpin became CMO in August, when Hyundai split its CMO role into creative- and performance-focused positions.
That split was meant to “bring more focus to the performance of [our] overall marketing investment,” Gilpin said. But “by no means” has that decision impacted Hyundai’s desire to grow brand awareness and favorability, he said. Brand awareness is the goal behind Hyundai’s most recent campaign.
That campaign, titled “The Road,” debuted during the NFL AFC and NFC championship game on January 26, the weekend before the Super Bowl. The video ad humorously depicts two drivers narrowly avoiding accidents with distracted drivers thanks to safety features built into its Tucson and Santa Fe models.
Hyundai makes a play for new sports fans
Hyundai’s latest campaign will continue running for the rest of the year on TV, YouTube and social media platforms, including TikTok and Facebook. It will also make appearances during other sports games Hyundai is sponsoring or running ads against throughout the year.
Hyundai will be advertising during March Madness next month, Gilpin said, noting that Hyundai also has partnerships with NBC’s Sunday Night Football and Amazon Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football. But “we don’t want to have to wait until fall to have a strong media presence” in sports, Gilpin said. In the US, football, soccer and ice hockey leagues all typically begin new seasons in the fall.
Plus, Gilpin said, it’s important for Hyundai to diversify the types of sports leagues it partners with. The same folks who watch the AFC or NFC games are not necessarily the same people watching the March Madness games, he said, which is why a varied approach to sports should help Hyundai reach more incremental audiences.
Hyundai measures awareness and incremental gains
Although brand awareness is this campaign’s primary goal, Gilpin said, raising brand awareness requires reaching new viewers. Which is why Hyundai’s main performance metric for this campaign is incremental reach, Gilpin added, rather than direct response. The brand is also looking at brand opinion and favorability as indicators of success.
For example, Hyundai uses market research company GfK for panel-based measurement on brand opinion, awareness and favorability, Gilpin said. The brand also measures video completion rates and engagement and works with other data partners for more performance-based metrics such as incremental search lift.
Based on this measurement, Hyundai can then serve more specific ads to certain audience cohorts based on which types of vehicles they’re likely to be interested in, Gilpin said, such as SUV intenders versus EV lovers. Hyundai uses clean room tech to match its own data with that of publisher partners and demand-side platforms such as Amazon and The Trade Desk.
Going forward, Gilpin said, Hyundai will pass more of this data to its dealerships. Local advertising is a “really important part of our media strategy this year.”
