Disney names Hyundai 100th anniversary sponsor as car brand preps global ad blitz

The Walt Disney Company has selected Hyundai as the first official brand partner and exclusive automotive sponsor of its upcoming 100th anniversary celebrations, marking the latest step in the increasingly friendly relationship between the entertainment giant and the South Korean automaker.

With the deal locked in, Hyundai is gearing up to launch a global ad blitz in 2023 that will include new campaigns, original content launches, experiential activations, as well as merchandising and social extensions connected to the Disney name and its intellectual property.

Hyundai and its agencies are currently nailing down the logistics of several “major chapters” in its year-long partnership with Disney, although it is still in its “early days,” emphasized Angela Zepeda, chief marketing officer of Hyundai Motor America, who signed on as CMO three years ago after a stint as an executive at Innocean, Hyundai’s agency of record. “It’ll be a year’s worth of work coming out with them. We’re working through that creative process right now.”

Those “chapters” will eventually culminate “in the ultimate celebration of the anniversary date in the fall of 2023,” said Zepeda, who declined to offer further details.

Disney’s 100th birthday will officially be celebrated on Oct. 16, 2023, a century after Walt Disney and his older brother Roy first established the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles in 1923.

Tough advertising choices

Once a Super Bowl stalwart that aired a commercial in almost every game in the 2010s, Hyundai — the first car brand to ever win USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter with its “First Date” spot in 2016 — has since shifted its advertising priorities away from the so-called Big Game.

The company has chosen to sit out the game for the past two years, and will again be absent from Super Bowl LVII when it occurs in February 2023.

“As a CMO, it’s still the biggest platform of the day. But the car industry is still fragile in a lot of ways,” said Zepeda, suggesting that while Hyundai wants to undertake “big things” as part of its yearlong Disney sponsorship deal, picking and choosing which tentpoles to focus on “are tough decisions with the company’s CEO and financial team.” Ad buying patterns for auto brands have been disrupted by supply chain issues, causing inventory challenges.

However, the company is “going to make more investment around the Super Bowl” in the new year as part of the Disney100 partnership, including by airing spots in the American and National Football Conference playoff games in January, said Zepeda. 

“We would like to have one or two tentpoles as part of the partnership, I just don’t know yet what they are. I think we’ll have some big news, but it’s too early,” she said.

Rita Ferro, Disney’s president of ad sales, estimates that Disney will be ready to reveal more details about its 100th anniversary brand efforts by early December, both with Hyundai and other yet-to-be-announced partners.

“We’re looking across all of the major verticals. I think when you see the list, you’re going to see a lot of the obvious categories of people we work with often around big programs,” Ferro said.

Working together once again

The Disney100 partnership is another stepping stone in the relationship between the entertainment powerhouse and the South Korea-based car company.

Hyundai has “been an extraordinary partner with ours for a number of years,” said Ferro, adding that “as soon as Angela came in [as Hyundai CMO], the evolution of our partnership really changed.”

On the heels of crossovers such as a 2018 ad that used “Ant-Man and The Wasp” to hype the three-door Hyundai Veloster, the two companies worked together last year on the automaker’s “Question Everything” campaign, a multi-pronged effort to promote the redesigned 2022 Tucson SUV that represented the single-largest marketing push in Hyundai’s history.

That campaign, handled by Innocean and Hyundai’s media agency Canvas, saw a string of commercials starring celebrities such as actor Jason Bateman and professional basketball player Kawhi Leonard. It also included tie-ins with a number of Disney-owned properties including Fox’s “Masked Singer” and ESPN’s “30 for 30,” as well as a centerpiece extension in mid-2021 that featured a cast of Marvel Cinematic Universe characters.

Disney has “just been a really good creative collaborator, not just putting the Tucson in as, like, a product placement,” Zepeda said of the company’s “Question Everything” campaign, which benefited from a first-of-its-kind use of integrated Mouse House IP within its ads. “It was hugely successful for us, it really was,” she said.

“When we started talking, in Cannes, about what round two of this partnership looks like, we immediately thought of Disney100. We’re super excited because it’s really going to be broad and expansive, just like it was on the first ‘Question Everything’ campaign,” Ferro said.

Earlier this year, Hyundai served as the client in an episode of the ABC sitcom “Black-ish” in which star Anthony Anderson, who plays an agency executive named Andre Johnson, works on a fictional Super Bowl commercial for the company’s then-new Ioniq 5 electric vehicle. (Hyundai sat out the real-life 2022 Super Bowl, which took place roughly a month after the episode aired.)

The automaker also collaborated with National Geographic, which has several commercial entities jointly owned by the Walt Disney Company, to create Outside Academy, an online augmented reality hub that lets users virtually explore three U.S. national parks.