Why Hyundai is handing its Instagram to other brands for Super Bowl weekend

While most social media teams are all hands on deck over Super Bowl weekend, Hyundai is heading out of the office—and turning its Instagram account over to other brands to run while it’s away.

At 5 p.m. today, Hyundai Motor America will clock out for the weekend and allow two dozen brands and nonprofits to get behind the wheel of its Instagram account for up to an hour, swapping the account’s icon to their own logo and sharing posts about their brand.

Participants in the “Big Hyundai Handoff” campaign include brands such as Adobe, Drumstick, Mint Mobile, Booking.com, Planet Fitness and Red Lobster; NFL teams including the Houston Texans, Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers; and nonprofits such as environmental advocacy group Heal the Bay, Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Best Friends Animal Society, a partner of this year’s Puppy Bowl.

For Hyundai, the $7 million price tag for 30 seconds of Super Bowl screentime hasn’t been worth the blow to its marketing budget for a few years now, said Angela Zepeda, chief marketing officer for Hyundai Motor America. But with so many brands splurging on attention-grabbing TV spots during the Big Game that fuel online chatter, “we get FOMO very quickly,” she added.

Hyundai hasn’t run a national Super Bowl spot since its memorable “Smaht Pahk” ad, which ranked second in USA Today’s Super Bowl ad meter in 2020. Since then, the automaker has shifted its TV advertising focus to the NFL’s championship games that determine the two teams facing each other in the Super Bowl, Zepeda said. Hyundai will be running a regional TV spot—the same viking-themed ad the brand showed over championship weekend—in several markets during the Big Game, she said. 

But even without a national TV spot, Hyundai wanted to stand out during Super Bowl weekend. So, on Feb. 1, creative agency Innocean USA proposed cutting through the sea of social media posts leading up to and during the Big Game by effectively turning Hyundai’s Instagram account—which has 657,000 followers as of this writing—into a transient social media billboard, said Jason Sperling, the agency’s chief creative officer. 

“The price of being in the Super Bowl gets crazier and crazier [each year], which makes it riskier and riskier,” he said. “And instead of trying to duke it out in the same way that everyone else is doing, I think people are looking for originality and interesting ways that brands present themselves.” 

‘It’s kind of insane’

Over the past week, the agency has been recruiting brands to take over Hyundai’s Instagram and working with some of them to determine what social content to share during their designated time slot, Sperling said. A few immediately “just had some wild ideas that left us smiling,” he added—but all of the posts needed to be submitted and approved by Hyundai and Innocean ahead of each brand’s allotted takeover. 

“Collaborating and not competing to win the Big Game weekend is such a smart, disruptive approach that we jumped at the opportunity for Mint Mobile to be involved,” wrote Aron North, chief marketing officer for Mint Mobile, in a statement. “We get to share our story, participate in something memorable and get to keep our $7 million. Win-win.”

The brand partners will largely send the content they want to post on Hyundai’s Instagram in advance, and the Hyundai social media team will “execute on behalf of them,” he said. Though, because reacting to real-time moments during the Big Game is a key part of Super Bowl social strategies, Hyundai’s team will coordinate with each brand taking over its Instagram to push out reactive content, if desired, Sperling said.

“It’s almost like having 30 different social media war rooms all coming together throughout the weekend,” he added. “It’s kind of insane.”

To boost the visibility of these brands’ and nonprofits’ posts, Hyundai and Innocean are putting paid media behind several pieces of social content throughout the weekend, and are planning to bring on an influencer to draw attention to some of the posts via their own Instagram account—though, Hyundai and Innocean haven’t finalized who that influencer will be, Sperling said. 

“We want to ensure success for these brands,” he said, “so, we’re helping them in the same way we probably would have helped ourselves for Super Bowl weekend, which is really by amplifying some of their content … We want to bring some real attention and eyeballs to them in a way that really helps them during one of the biggest weekends for social media.”

The concept of having Hyundai head out for the weekend also connects to the automaker’s larger campaign around its new 2024 Santa Fe SUV, which will be featured in the Instagram post announcing Hyundai’s exit for the weekend and its post-Super Bowl return, Zepeda said. That new model is also highlighted in Hyundai’s regional Super Bowl spot. And on Monday morning, the SUV will roll back onto Hyundai’s Instagram account covered in mud after a weekend of outdoor adventuring, Sperling said.