Hyundai teams up with rock band Flaming Lips for Super Bowl ad
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LOS ANGELES -- Hyundai has teamed-up with psychedelic rock band the Flaming Lips for the brand’s 60-second Super Bowl commercial running prior to kickoff.
The Flaming Lips wrote an original song that will serve as the soundtrack to Hyundai’s “Epic Play Date” commercial for its redesigned 2013 Santa Fe. The spot shows an outlandish family outing of skateboarding kids, dad doing donuts in the mud, the family being chased by museum security guards, a biker gang and one angry-looking ostrich.
Hyundai will also run two 30-second ads during the Super Bowl, plus two more 30-second spots during pregame coverage.
The band will appear throughout the commercial and include the song, entitled “Sun Blows Up Today,” on its upcoming album, The Terror, to be released in April.
“For a long time, we’ve wanted to do an original piece of music,” Steve Shannon, vice president of marketing for Hyundai Motor America, said in an interview this week.
Shannon said the song will be incorporated into a Hyundai marketing program to roll out in the coming weeks that will include radio and online elements. The song will be available for download next Wednesday on iTunes, Apple’s digital music service, and Hyundai will offer 100,000 downloads for free on its Hyundai.com homepage, Shannon said.
The cross promotion is an example of how automakers are incorporating new online marketing tactics into their Super Bowl advertising plans to extend the reach of game day advertising beyond the game itself. Nearly all automotive advertisers post teaser videos, photos and sometimes even their full Super Bowl ads online to create buzz leading up to the game.
The goal is to get more bang for their Super Bowl buck. A 30-second Super Bowl ad costs advertisers between $3.7 million and $3.8 million on average, according to Advertising Age, an affiliate of Automotive News.
Consumers, Shannon says, are hungry for this kind of digital content.
Said Shannon: “There’s an upside opportunity because of the audience, the interest and the appetite for this stuff surrounding this game.”
You can reach Ryan Beene at rbeene@crain.com. -- Follow Ryan on 
