HYUNDAI – Talking Monkey

christian sternal

creative director | copywriter

Eventually, all the pieces fell into place. Build quality. A game-changing 10/100 warranty. Styling evolved from clunky to competitive. Then Goodby’s provocative “Think about it” campaign launched and elevated peoples perceptions. Next came best-in-class fuel-efficiency ratings in just about every class. And finally, the brand adopted a slippery design philosophy. They called it “fluidic sculpture” and it had peoples heads turning whiplash fast. I started working on the national business just as the brand was starting to give each model its fluidic facelift.

Unretail Retail

Hard-working, beautiful and thanks to the voice talents of Jeff “The Dude” Bridges, these Tier 1 spots sounded great good, too. Making retail perform like retail but not look and act like it is a pretty good trick, wouldn’t you say?

Challenging Print

Hyundai sponsors the Sun Bowl in El Paso, TX. Like the Rose, Sugar and Orange Bowls, it’s one of the oldest and most anticipated collegiate games of the year. They needed a program ad for 51,000 screaming football-minded fans to look at in between downs. We created this.

Thoughtful Work.
Literally, Work Full of Thoughts.

Raw reactions to the new model Hyundai cars were priceless. People were blown away by the sleek new design language—and they wore it on their faces. So we team cranked out Hyundai Uncensored. A campaign built entirely around real people, real reactions and their real comments—uncensored. To this day, it’s still considered the most successful campaigns Hyundai has ever done. Pure, hard-working, effective work.

3, 18, 700

3 cities: Los Angeles. Chicago. Atlanta. 18 cameras. 700 hours of footage.

Auto-Tune DJ Remix

We decided to squeeze a little more out of the work by letting auto-tune video remix ninja DJ Steve Porter have his way with the selects.

Optical Illusion Print & POS

All the POS print was designed with some built-in visual trickery. From far away viewers could clearly read the headline of each piece, however, the closer they got to it, the more the headlines seemed to fade and the backgrounds—made up of thousands of names of real people and their real comments relevant to the headline—became clear. Yeah, I know…pretty damn cool, right?

Out-of-Home

If you’ve been to an auto show in the past decade you know that Hyundai takes this opportunity to get in your head very seriously. These “thought nugget” support pieces were placed in and around shows in LA and Minneapolis. Simple, effective, and fun to read (and write).

The 360 Audio Tour

A lot of customers really, really don’t like to talk to salespeople. We knew that. But then we learned they’ll even browse dealerships when they’re closed to avoid them. So we created a way for them to use their phones to take a walk-around “guided tour” of any model on the lot, at any time of day or night. (Remember, this was 2011.) Special window clings gave customers easy access to each model’s custom narration. All they had to do was walk and listen.

Bring it

Here’s the thing. I like a weird challenge. We needed a simple, lo-fi solution that would help plug a leak that we discovered in the plan, so I came up with this. It required an epic amount of research and a marathon recording session, but no other time-consuming development or major investments. Problem solved.

agency TEAM