Jason Bateman shines in a new Super Bowl ad for Hyundai. The spot is called “The Elevator,” and depicts Bateman as an elevator operator who drops patrons off at some of the worst imaginable situations: root canal, a talk with your parents about the birds and the bees, sitting middle seat on a plane for six hours. He then drops his ‘car shoppers’ off way down, at the car shopping level (which is very low), only for them to tell him they’re getting a Hyundai.
“Hyundai. Going up,” Bateman replies, clicking a button to bring them to a higher floor.
Speaking to USA Today recently, Barney Goldberg, the executive creative director of the ad agency behind the commercial, said, “… the idea is really, ‘What if you took all those things that you have to do but love to avoid?’ And what if there were floors in a building kind of stacked on top of each other? And what if there were an elevator that dropped people off at sort of the painful places they had to go?” He goes on to say, “We think there are little things people will catch, on their second, third and 12th viewings.”
The 60-second ad will run in the first quarter of the game. It features the “Shopper Assurance” program, which, in the words of Ad Age, “seeks to modernize the car-buying experience.”
Why did they choose humor over a more emotional commercial this year? Dean Evans, the chief marketing officer at Hyundai Motor America, told Ad Age, “There is no crying your way to a better Shopper Assurance. But just reading society tea leaves, we also thought after two years of very somber messages, and a very somber environment we are in today, it was probably best for us to be in the Super Bowl and make people laugh.”
Hyundai has had success with their past commercials. In 2016, they received the highest Ad-Meter ranking based on consumer votes for their 2016 Kevin Hart commercial, “First Date”.
And last year, Hyundai highlighted the Hope on Wheels program in their commercial titled “Hope Detector”. The spot was interactive, as it surprised three American troops wth their family members virtually. At the time, Innocean chief creative officer Eric Springer said, “When you go out and buy a car, every car has a bunch of features on it… What we realized with Hyundai Hope on Wheels … we have a feature called ‘hope,’ and that no other car company has that feature.”
Will this year’s spot be as successful as the last few? Evans tells the Times Record News, “Well, we hope so. We really think so with the amount of laughs we got on set.”