Hyundai restructures marketing team, splitting creative and performance marketing oversight

Hyundai Motor America is splitting its marketing leadership in two with one executive overseeing creative and another one leading performance marketing. 

Angela Zepeda, who has held the chief marketing officer title since late 2019, becomes chief creative officer, with her role now confined to overseeing social, creative, experiential and multicultural marketing. 

Sean Gilpin, now Vice President of global sales marketing for Hyundai Motor Co., takes on the additional title of Vice President for marketing performance for Hyundai Motor America. His duties will include media buying, customer relationship management, digital retail, marketing financial management and Tier 2 marketing, which refers to activities such as regional sales events that are closely related to dealer activities.

Both executives will report to Hyundai Motor America CEO Randy Parker.

“The marketing creative team will focus on producing and developing creative content to engage audiences across all marketing channels,”  Hyundai said in a statement. “The marketing performance team will take an analytical approach to reviewing the placement, volume and quantitative effectiveness of marketing strategy to drive operational excellence and better align with sales performance.”

Hyundai’s U.S. creative agency of record is Innocean USA, while media is handled by Canvas.

Performance marketing — typically defined as responsible for generating sales, leads and clicks — has risen in importance in recent years as CEOs put a premium on marketing with instantly measurable results. As Automotive News sister publication Ad Age reported last year, performance marketing jobs are high in demand at brands and agencies. 

But some marketing practitioners have argued for tighter cohesion between performance marketing and brand building, which is traditionally seen as a longer-term investment. The movement has even led to a new buzzword — “brandformance.”

“Brand building is losing out more and more, in large part because performance marketing is considered to be much more closely linked to measurable business results,” according to a 2023 article published in Harvard Business Review co-authored by former Procter & Gamble global CMO Jim Stengel, Wharton School Marketing Professor Cait Lamberton and Ken Favaro, chief strategy officer at BERA Brand Management, a software program designed to manage brand value. 

But “we believe that pitting brand building and performance marketing against each other in a competition for budget and attention unnecessarily damages the effectiveness of both,” the authors stated before outlining ways to improve brand marketing metrics.

While Hyundai is dividing creative marketing and performance marketing leadership, the automaker in its statement said “the two divisions will work together to deliver industry-leading marketing and advertising that drive shopping activity.”

“From EVs and hybrids to technology innovations, the market is filled with noise and information that can be confusing to customers and sometimes distract from the core brand message,” Parker said. “This restructure will allow us to build marketing programs around data and sales performance.”