On Super Bowl Sunday Hyundai launched “Angry Bosses,” an ad that depicted corpos all over the world angrily shouting Hyundai! in various states of aneurysm-inducing rage.
At the end, a calm voiceover goes, “Win one little award, and suddenly everyone gets your name right. It’s ‘Hyundai’, like ‘Sunday’.”
Never mind the screamers in the video. That last line, “It’s ‘Hyundai’, like ‘Sunday’,” has incited the righteous indignation of at least one man, “Bernard in CT,” who believes the idea of rhyming “Hyundai” with days of the week was his idea.
And damnit, he deserves the cred for it.
Letter and ad below.
Hi.
A friend of mine owns a Hyundai dealership here in town. In August 2007, I came up with a great (well, to me) idea relating HYUNDAI with the DAYS of the week, as the current ad campaign by Goodby Silverstein (San Francisco), at that time, was the DUH campaign, which wasn’t really well received by the dealers. I then posted my idea on my blog, specifically to copyright it (yeah, I know there’s other ways…)In November 2007, I contacted Goodby Silverstein San Francisco (Linda Harless, Creative Services, Associate Partner) letting her know I had an idea for a campaign, and asking the best way for me to present the idea to the agency. I never heard from the agency, even via a robotic email reply.
My email signature, however, does have a hyperlink to my blog, and a search of my blog with the term HYUNDAI quickly pulls up the entire idea.
I strongly believe my idea was plagiarized as I stressed, in the body copy, RHYMING HyunDAI with DAY (MonDAY or MonDAI).
The time frame for development of a campaign with this as the basic structure seems to dovetail their receipt of my email (November 2007) and subsequent use during their Superbowl commercial, given the length of time it takes from initial idea to finished project.
Here’s the link to the original posting on my blog.
We feel for the guys that get genuinely ripped off by big-ass agencies and even bigger brands. But a cursory “hyundai sunday” search on Google suggests, well, lots of people have enjoyed putting the two words together for various reasons, even at points that pre-date the guy’s blog entry.
Replacing “sunday” with any other day of the week will probably yield about the same result. Except maybe for “wednesday,” because “Hyundai Wednesday” just sounds wrong.
