Hyundai skips Super Bowl again in favor of Viking-filled championship weekend campaign

In Hyundai’s newest campaign, weekend warriors don’t just wear hiking boots—they also blow Viking horns. The automaker plays into what it says is a rising interest in Viking culture as it plugs its new 2024 Santa Fe SUV in a campaign debuting during this weekend’s NFL conference championship games. The spot, from Hyundai lead agency Innocean, shows a family portrayed as Vikings driving the vehicle for a mountainous getaway. The Viking fantasy is briefly spoiled by a reality check—dad gets a call from work and is shown wearing regular clothing for a moment—before he returns to Viking form. Running ads during the NFC and AFC championship games instead of the Super Bowl has emerged as a consistent strategy for Hyndai, a one-time regular Super Bowl advertiser that has not been in the game since 2020. Super Bowl commercials Tracking the latest brand and agency plans Enter here While the championship games don’t attract over 100 million viewers like the Super Bowl has in recent years, the championship game ratings are still huge compared to everything else on TV. Last weekend’s Chiefs-Bills divisional playoff drew an average of 50.39 million viewers. Championship weekend is also a lot cheaper—ad time runs for about one-third the cost of a Super Bowl ad (which this year is running as high as $7 million for 30 seconds), according to Hyundai Motor America Chief Marketing Officer Angela Zepeda. “I still do love Super Bowl,” Zepeda said. But “it’s a lot of money for one day,” she said, noting that Hyundai has to make “decisions about where to best put our dollars for where we’re at. And we have a lot to do every single year.” Other automakers have made that same decision this year, with recent Super Bowl regulars General Mills, Toyota and Stellantis also sitting out the 2024 game. Hyundai is exploring running its ad in some local markets during the Super Bowl, “which kind of feels like we are in the Super Bowl, but not really,” Zepeda said. Jason Sperling, chief creative officer at Innocean USA, noted that there is one potential benefit for being in this weekend’s games, which include the AFC title tilt on CBS that pits the Baltimore Ravens against the Kansas City Chiefs, a team that has drawn the interest of millions of Taylor Swift fans ever since she began dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in the fall. If the Chiefs lose, “you're gonna lose the Taylor Swift effect in the Super Bowl,” Sperling said. So this weekend’s game is “a huge potential moment” to reach Swifties. Also read: How Taylor Swift could impact Super Bowl advertising Asked whether Hyundai had any social media plan to get on the Swift bandwagon, Sperling said, “We’ve talked about it, whether or not it turns into something, we’ll see.” As for the TV campaign, Zepeda said her brief to the agency for the ad was to make it “feel like we’re in the Super Bowl without actually being in the Super Bowl,” meaning the creative “feels big and epic and entertaining and fun.” Sperling said the inspiration came from the popularity of Viking-themed TV shows in recent years, which includes the History Channel’s “Vikings” series that ended its run in 2020 but is still available on streaming services such as Amazon Prime. The ad targets families “that use their weekends to really go out there and be adventurous. And so, you know, we wanted to show the sort of transformative nature that you feel as the weekend rolls around and take that to the Nth degree,” he said. The 2024 Santa Fe, which is the fifth generation of the midsize crossover, has a design that is radically different from previous versions—most notably more angular exterior features. Automotive News described the evolution as going from “a jellybean family hauler to a boxy adventure mobile,” noting the decision, according to Hyundai, was “derived from ‘big data’ that revealed strong consumer interest in lifestyle trends such as ‘camping and gear-intensive adventures.’”

Hyundai skips Super Bowl again in favor of Viking-filled championship weekend campaign

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