Dive Brief:
- Hyundai Motor America kicked off a multi-channel marketing campaign to promote the new Elantra called "This is How You Dare," according to details the car company shared with Marketing Dive.
- The effort reimagines traditional car commercials for the millennial and Gen Z generations by highlighting the car's modern technical features as well as the groups' passion for challenging the norm, including questioning previous generations' attitudes towards gender.
- Creative agency B-Reel worked on the campaign. The cross-channel effort includes a 90-second TV spot and a 60-second TV spot, as well as online, social, OOH, retail and print messaging.
Dive Insight:
Rather than a sales message, the new Elantra campaign embraces youth culture, with the ads announcing: "How do you dare? The answer is you. This is how you dare." The approach is based on the insight that these younger generations don't like overt sales messages and want authenticity from the brands they associate with, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
The ads take an inclusive approach to gender, with some of the actors in the spot not adopting gender-normative clothes or haircuts. The young man and the young woman at the opening of one spot resemble each other, both with shaved heads and orange clothing. The brand seems to be saying the Elantra is for everyone and that it is open to the LGBTQ+ community, whose total global spending power is about the size of the GDP of the fourth-largest country in the world. The campaign comes as a growing number of marketers, from Starbucks to Gillette, see the adoption of less narrow, binary definitions of gender as critical to growth and winning over audiences like Gen Z.
Millenials have become the largest car buying demographic in the United States and savvy car marketers are addressing the shopping and buying preferences of this group. The ad has a similar feeling to Acura's "Less Talk, More Drive" campaign from last fall, which targeted performance-minded younger consumers across Amazon, Bustle and Thrillist.
The new Elantra creative comes after a change at the top of Hyundai’s marketing team. Angela Zepeda joined the company as chief marketing officer in October following the departure of Dean Evans. Zepeda was SVP and managing director at Innocean, the automaker's agency of record, and has 25 years of marketing experience.
