Hyundai Motor Company kicked off a new global campaign dubbed “Next Starts Now” at the New York International Auto Show earlier this month, a nod to its focus on innovation in mobility and robotics.
As an official FIFA partner and mobility provider, Hyundai has several World Cup tie-ins planned for the soccer tournament this June. Son Heung-min, captain of South Korea’s national team, was named the company’s global brand ambassador. The LAFC forward will appear at experiences throughout the tournament alongside Boston Dynamics’ quadraped robot Spot and Atlas, an advanced humanoid robot the company unveiled at CES.
Hyundai is hosting youth soccer camps as well, led by former U.S. star players Mia Hamm and Tim Howard, in four host cities — Atlanta, Miami, New Jersey and Los Angeles. It also launched a global children’s drawing contest inviting kids to submit artwork supporting their favorite teams.
We sat down with Hyundai Motor America CMO Sean Gilpin at the auto show to discuss the FIFA partnership, data-driven marketing strategies, brand versus performance, AI efficiencies in media and more.
CM: Your career trajectory, which most recently involved a stint as Chief Business Officer at agency Innocean, includes a focus on performance. Would you say that the CMO role has evolved to prioritize a performance element? Has data-driven decision making factored into your overall growth strategy?
Sean Gilpin, CMO at Hyundai Motor America: Data-driven for sure. I don’t want to say performance means it’s void of brand, because I actually think branding is what drives performance better than anything. You have to have a strong brand. It’s understanding what is going to influence brand health and making sure that eliminating waste — finding opportunity to take whatever excess budget there is and feed it into things that are more impactful — is the overall practice.
But I don’t want to give the impression that it’s low funnel. I think sometimes when we hear performance, we just assume it’s direct response and this kind of stuff. It’s really more of, how do I get the maximum output of the investment to make a good impression on consumers in terms of the overall brand.
CM: Can you provide any examples of how that strategy has worked for you?
SG: Recently there’s been a really big pull for customers to experience our products. And in a lot of ways communicating that through traditional channels is not always as effective as we want. We’re seeing a return to physical experiences, so we’re doing a lot with our motorsports team and a lot of our activations in person. We’re here at the New York Auto Show. And while a lot of other brands are moving away from experiences — we’ve got a big plan for the FIFA World Cup, for example — we’re going to be all around the country activating and getting customers to interact with our brand directly and physically. I think it’s something that people are craving.
Another example of that would be just right-sizing our investments between connected TV and the traditional broadcasts and larger sports sponsorships. We try to have a strong presence every quarter. But in order to do that, we had to right-size our media investments and be able to show up where we need to and not have these big peaks and valleys in terms of our media presence. But all that was done through data.
CM: So you’re seeing what works best and really drilling down on where there’s waste.
SG: Yeah. And I think AI’s helped us with understanding that data a little bit better. It’s less manual. So we’re able to do a lot more attribution and measurement than we had probably done five, six years ago. There was some latency in being able to make those decisions. You’d have to take a quarter to look back a quarter and figure out what was going on, whereas now it almost feels like you’re doing live scenario planning on performance.
CM: On the topic of AI: Are there other uses within the marketing organization in addition to the CTV uses you mentioned? Are personnel using it?
SG: Less of it is enterprise-level AI usage, where everyone logs in and is using some form of an AI application. It’s more of, how do we move faster? How do we bring more personalization? How can we maybe do more with content asset generation? We’re not letting AI create in terms of what should we make, but it’s helping you scale personalization a lot faster. If we want content to look contextually relevant for a regional basis, Florida looks different than California. How do we create assets? AI’s helping us move a lot faster in that space. Definitely on the media side there’s been more advancements.
We’re using [AI] a lot in making our search decisions faster. We’re doing a lot on the content side for LLMs, almost working backwards from what are the most common prompt questions in our space. And making sure that we provide answers.
I think that we’re seeing commerce move in that direction. I don’t think it’s fully in auto yet, but we’re definitely going to be at a point where customers will task AI to do portions of the buying or service process. [Things like] make me an oil change appointment. Submit a lead and tell me what the best payment should be for this vehicle. That stuff we’re seeing already. I don’t think it’s fully tipped the scale into common practice, but I think brands have to be ready for that behavior.
Hyundai’s typically on the forefront of that. We try to move a little bit first in the market. We were the first to go into Amazon because we felt like there was a lot for us to learn from an ecommerce side. And there was a lot for our dealers to learn from a customer side.
CM: How is the Amazon ecommerce partnership working? What are you learning so far?
SG: Being in that marketplace is introducing us to a lot of customers that had not seen or considered us, which was one of the hopes — that this was not just ecommerce. It was more of a marketplace for us to bring our products and introduce ourselves to customers that weren’t thinking about our brand. We’re seeing quite a few customers not want to finish the entire journey online, but they like the transparency of knowing, is this really the price? What would my payment be? They get almost waist-deep in a deal, and then they want to go and finish that in person.
Some of that has to be [that] they want to go and physically touch and see that car, back to these physical experiences. People that are already familiar with the brand might be more prone to just repeating and doing it fully online. But the amount of people that we’ve sold vehicles to through that program that were net new to brand is significantly higher than our average sales conquest to loyalty rate.
It’s been a good win-win. I think we’ve both learned a little bit through the process. Amazon has got another battery of UX improvements that they’re going to do based on learnings that the dealers have shared and the customers have shared. It’s a constant evolution, but it’s a really nice channel. It’s not our exclusive online channel. We just want to be available to wherever customers prefer to shop. We want our products to be as easy to access as possible.
CM: You mentioned that you’re going big into experiences. You’re here at the auto show, but what other types of activations are you doing this year?
SG: With experiences, whether they’re physical or digital, we’re trying to create more meaningful moments versus just pure awareness. With a lot of our products, some of the best parts of our car are on the inside. And it’s hard to convey all that just through traditional advertising. If we can create moments or events or be at places where the customer has an opportunity to interact with our product, that’s really important for us. But also there’s social creative content and other things that maybe bring people in, and then we introduce them to an opportunity to come and see that car in person. It’s more of just an overall pull strategy to get people to come to us versus pushing a message out.
FIFA’s probably the best example of a near-term experiential push that we have. Our FIFA campaign has a lot to do with introducing our brand to what we’re calling the next generation, but also the next generation of technology and innovation from our brand. The idea is showing that Hyundai’s breadth of innovation goes beyond cars. So with Atlas, that we revealed at CES, et cetera, there’s going be a lot more of showing what this technology can do for consumers.
View this post on Instagram
CM: What is your strategy for marketing a technical story to consumers in a way that’s interesting yet also meaningful and memorable?
SG: A lot of times people do a straight line from ‘innovation equals technology.’ But one of the most innovative things about Hyundai is how we behave as a company. We don’t really do the ordinary things. We were the first to really do America’s Best Warranty, job loss assurance … The technology and the way we represent it is always a people-first approach. It’s not technology for technology’s sake. And showing how that company north star influences how we make product and how we make it accessible to people is a big part of that. This isn’t an unobtainable technology ‘for some.’ A lot of what we do is bring the best of what’s available to make it more accessible to everyone, whether it be safety features in the car, whether it be technology, things that maybe are only available in a luxury product. We bring that to our Hyundai products.
CM: And creatively, how does that play out?
SG: Through more human stories. We tend to have more character-driven, more relatable content in a lot of the things that we do. Whether it’s bringing John Krasinski and storytelling into a brand new product, it’s not so product-focused that we lose the audience, where we’re just talking about ourselves … Music is another big area where I think that’s possible. There’s some shared connection points on things that we like in culture.
CM: When it comes to courting the youngest car buyers out there, how has your marketing strategy shifted? How is their consumer journey different? You mentioned music, which I’m sure is a part of it. How are you relating to them in different ways than previous generations?
SG: We’re learning a lot. There’s actually some things that are maybe counterintuitive about what we’re seeing from this generation. They want some more physical experiences, and they want the ecommerce. It’s almost like millennials are more prone to buying online, whereas Gen Z physically wants to go in because it’s new to them, and they want a salesman to help them figure out the car. Same thing with these physical experiences. We see a lot of opportunity with connecting with customers in person at that younger age.
Otherwise we still see big interest in sports, big interest in some of these other live viewing moments. But that’s probably our biggest ‘aha’ moment with the younger generation, is that there’s a big difference between a millennial and a Gen Z in terms of some of the things that are almost going retro in terms of what they’re seeking.
CM: But the linear TV commercial is still important in terms of the media buy.
SG: Yeah. I think it’s all part of a unique sequence for each consumer, but linear is absolutely still very powerful. Live sports are still commanding massive prices in the market for a reason. Being competitive there, having a presence there is important, but it’s not a place where you can get it all done and not have to be in these other areas to reach incremental audiences. The key is getting incremental reach. Who am I not reaching through those areas, and what are the right touchpoints and stories we have to tell to make sure they understand who we are and what we’re offering?
This interview has been edited and condensed.