Car ads go electric: ‘Might as well sell the future’
Many major automakers are touting plug-ins for the first time
If you watched NBC’s “Monday Night Football” in the fall, you might have seen a Hyundai ad called “Gas Card.” It goes like this: A dad gives his daughter a gas station gift card; she never uses it because she drives a plugin hybrid Tucson from Hyundai; she gives the card back to him on his birthday.
The style, as with the other spots in Hyundai’s campaign for its new electrified SUVs, will be familiar to regular viewers of American television: A bit of light humor unfolds in some sunny place where yards are well-manicured, traffic is light and neighbors are friendly.
“We want it to feel like it’s part of our brand,” says Angela Zepeda, chief marketing officer for Hyundai Motor America. “We’re trying to grab a little bit of their heart or their funny bone.”
The Hyundai campaign was part of a watershed year for electric vehicle advertising. Many of the major automakers began, for the first time, giving plug-ins the kind of nationwide push typically reserved for their best-selling combustion engine models.
Car brands collectively ran four times as many national television ads for EVs in 2021 as they did in either of the previous two years. General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., and Volkswagen AG, among others, spent an estimated $248 million on nearly 33,000 spots, up from $83 million spent on 8,000 commercials in 2019, according to data from marketing analytics startup EDO, Inc. Meanwhile, ads for traditional models slid by more than 35,000 airings, with automakers lowering their national TV budgets from an estimated $3.8 billion in 2019 to $3.1 billion in 2021.
At General Motors, for example, the EV ad plan has three stages, according to Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl: normalize, personalize and mesmerize. “The accelerator of EV consideration is much faster than we thought,” she says. “In our minds, we’re already past normalize.”
The quick shift to electric marketing was partly a knock-on effect of disruptions in the supply chain, according to EDO president and CEO Kevin Krim. Automakers typically split their national ad budgets between annual sales events (“December to Remember”), new model launches and brand burnishing (“Built Ford Tough”). This year, with internal combustion engine cars in short supply, brands pulled back on the first two categories — why tell consumers to hurry in today for a car that’s not there? — and used their airtime, often paid for long in advance, to begin nudging buyers to think electric.
“It’s really striking that, even though everyone saw electric coming for a long, long time, no one was really messaging it at any scale,” says Krim, “until suddenly you don’t have any conventional cars, so you might as well sell the future.”