Shooting the Kia Telluride X-Pro for the brand's TV commercial in Super Bowl LVII.
Kia is returning to the Super Bowl with a new social-media partner but an existing hot vehicle model, comprising one of just a few automotive Big Game advertisers this year in a category that typically can be counted on for several more. Kia is one of few brands reporting robustly rising U.S. sales these days, so in part its commercial is a bit of a celebration of success.
In a 60-second spot titled “Binky Dad,” the brand’s 14th Super Bowl ad, Kia depicts a father who is desperately scrambling to recover his infant’s pacifier. Kia’s Telluride X-Pro version is Dad’s trusty sidekick as he traverses a number of sticky situations to recover “Binky,” set to the musical score “Gonna Fly Now,” the theme from Rocky.
But while Telluride is a gasoline-powered model in an era of ascendance of all-electric vehicles, “Binky Dad” is very au courant in another sense: TikTok is involved. Kia is using TikTok to provide three alternative endings to the spot.
“TikTok is the new YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all in one,” Russell Wager, vice president of marketing for Kia America, told me. “Everyone is there. Conversations are happening there. We wanted to keep people having a conversation about Kia there during and after the game.”
Kia chose to feature Telluride in part, Wager explained, because it’s a very capable and popular vehicle but enjoys only 50% consumer awareness. In September, Kia boosted production of Telluride at its plant near Atlanta by about 20%, in part reflecting rising demand and enjoying a lack of supply-chain problems for the three-row SUV around microchips or anything else.
“We are trying to make sure we keep the demand [for Telluride] up so we can keep all the employees there and hire more,” Wager said. “We’re maxing out capacity and can’t meet demand even with the production increase.”
Besides, Wager said, Kia featured its EV6 all-electric model last year in a Super Bowl commercial, “our start of making a big statement about EVs. We sold more than 20,000 of them after that. But you don’t do a Super Bowl ad to sell 20,000 cars; we did it to let people know we’re in the electrified space, and we did a pretty good job of getting everyone’s understanding that they should plut us on their [EV shopping] list. Last year EV6 got to the point where it was the No. 2-selling EV model behind Tesla.”
The creative for “Binky Dad” is aimed squarely, of course, at millennial parents for whom Telluride has joined a panoply of three-row SUV models that automakers have introduced over the last several years particularly to appeal to that demographic. It may be a stretch for a brand to try to make a hero out of a dad driving around to retrieve a pacifier, but Kia’s attempt rings true.
“This is the story of any parent who’s trying to be a hero to their kids,” Wager said. Plus, the spot shows off the Telluride X-Pro version, with its rugged styling cues and functional and comfort upgrades for safety and off-roading. “That’s why we wanted Telluride to be the sidekick, to make the car the hero and at the same time show X-Pro’s capabilities.”
Wager anticipates that the Super Bowl ad will help continue Kia brand momentum which saw it gain sales and market share in the U.S. last year and last month post its best retail sales in January ever. “We’re going to keep our foot on the accelerator and let people know we’ve got great products they should consider,” he said. “Not everyone is doing that.”
Kia has emerged from the Covid era of supply-chain snarls. “Now we have the vehicles that customers want,” Wager said. “A year ago, if a vehicle appealed to a customer, he might not have been able to actually buy it. Now that’s starting to get normalized. People have choices again.”
And despite ever-rising interest rates, “there’s still so much demand out there,” Wager said.
