Free Floormats Trigger New Cold War

Hyundai has been running a commercial where Japanese, German, and American car execs are running tests on a Hyundai SUV and becoming frustrated at how wonderful a vehicle it is.

That's, um, weird.  For one thing, it seems bizarre that they're so upset over a few cheap option packages.  Never mind the fact that they wasted so much money building that secret test facility in the mountains just to get information that's available on Hyundai's website.  I seem to remember Chevy did an ad along similar lines years ago, but that was for the Corvette, so it seemed a little more consequential than a midsize SUV.

But the biggest reason it stands out is that it's a pretty brazen use of stereotypes.  Of course, the German guy is no more German than the engineers VW uses on its own ads.  And it's always bugged me how both Japanese and German companies subtly use prejudice to their advantage by reminding everyone that it's not engineering, it's Japanese/German engineering.  And I also complained about American manufacturer's use of stereotyping earlier.

But this seems particularly unfair since Hyundai is from South Korea.  That country is relatively new on the world stage, so we don't really have many stereotypes about them.  If another company wanted to do a similar commercial against them, they'd have to have the Korean exec constantly eating kimchi.  And constantly remarking that it is kimchi, since I don't think I'd even recognize it.

They even seem to be rubbing it in at the end; normally I'd say the choice of 1995's "This Is How We Do It" would be a weird feature in a 2015 ad campaign, but in this case, we don't even know if they're out of touch, or maybe that song is just big in Korea right now.

VW toyed with making fun of it's competitors' nationalities a few years ago. They had a series of ads about former auto engineers - from various parts of the world - who had gone into other lines of work to avoid the stress of having to compete with VW.  They came across as quite mean-spirited.  Aside from how childish look-at-how-silly-our-competition-is ads are, they were kind of kicking people while they're down.  Was it really necessary to show a stressed-out British auto industry retiree?  And the Italian episode of the campaign was in especially bad taste, showing a guy named "Enzo" who supposedly couldn't compete with VW's GTI.  Of course, there was a famous guy at an Italian sports car company named Enzo, and I don't think he really worried about the GTI.

So hopefully we won't see much more of car companies promoting mediocre cars through overacting spoofs of its competitors.  But if Hyundai tries this again, I want to see somebody have the courage to turn the tables, and have an ad where all the Hyundai employees are doing Psy impersonations.