Advertising creatives have long believed that the very best ideas are the ones that fall just inside that magical fence that separates genius from madness. But there are plenty of examples of campaigns that have smashed through that fragile median, with a new series of advertisements for Hyundai in Europe going straight to the top of the list.
While there have been many terrible advertisements made about cars—we encourage you to nominate your own best and worst examples in the comments—few have been as head-scratchingly terrible as the series of videos that have, apparently, been commissioned for the launch of Hyundai’s N performance sub-brand in Europe.
We fully acknowledge that something may well have been lost in translation. With a few notable exceptions, we’re not the European millennials whom we suspect these videos are aimed at. But on first impression, the Feel the Feeling digital campaign that has been created—no doubt at enormous cost—by international agency R/GA’s London office seems remarkably bad, attempting to spoof the sort of men’s lifestyle advertising that has already been well ridiculed and that, for the most part, has already died out.
Maybe it’s some kind of “so bad it’s good” switcheroo; the advertisements are certainly hard to stop watching. The first three spots include a buff male model spraying himself with a cologne called Eau de Burned Rubber, another one blow-drying his face, and a third—a video we suspect wasn’t created without some major chemical stimulation—featuring a man who wears headphones in the bath and then turns into a horse. If you’ve already watched any of these embedded clips, you know we’re not making this up.
What this has to do with the launch of a range of hotted-up Hyundais, we struggle to say. An interview published on industry website AdAge quotes James Temple, R/GA’s executive vice president, saying that the campaign is intended to “shake up the staid formula of car advertising, and most importantly to have some fun with viewers. We want people to rethink their views of Hyundai as a practical, compromise choice, to a brand which shows people through the power of ‘N’ that they make cars that are fun to drive and which aren’t like anything else out there.”
We’re not quite sure how you get from that to spoofing the sort of young, moderately affluent male buyers who are most likely to be attracted to N products.
R/GA’s history is, if anything, more compelling than its latest campaign, having created the opening title sequence for the 1978 Superman movie and—according to a 2012 interview in the Guardian—reinventing itself every nine years because of its CEO’s belief in the power of numerology.
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