The Super Bowl's most refreshingly honest car ad

February 7, 2013

In 2000's High Fidelity, hapless record-store owner Rob Gordon -- played memorably by John Cusack -- opines, “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like." In the year 2000, I was 24 years old and was working on a punk rock magazine, an environment not dissimilar from Gordon's Championship Vinyl. The line made a lot of sense to me; it was a quiet, back-of-the-head maxim that informed much of what my friends and I did and how we saw people.

It's a shallow way of looking at things, but for those of us who came of age amid the us-vs.-them liberal identity politics of the '90s, awash as we were in Public Enemy's political consciousness, the post-AIDS gay-rights push and the loud-fast feminism of the riot grrrl movement, there was a good chance that if somebody liked the things you liked, they thought like you and they were good. Never mind if they were actually atrocious, sociopathic human beings.

A few years ago, I dated a shambolic disaster of a girl; in retrospect there was no future from the start. But I loved her enthusiasm for things I could normally care less about; it wasn't what she liked. It was how she liked it.

In this day and age of electronic cultural recycling, anything can be mined at any time; if some obscure cultural memory catches the fancy of some cynic in a basement, it's fodder for a minor mass-culture moment without regard to its original context.

It's all the what without any of the why or how.

Hyundai's “Team” ad, which took second place in Autoweek's ranking of this year's automotive Super Bowl commercials, certainly ticked my “what” boxes.

Immediately after seeing it, I tweeted, “So @Hyundai had the smarts to put a brown car and a bear in the same commercial. @johnkrafcik, why you gotta court my vote like that?”

The affable John Krafcik, Hyundai Motor America's CEO and perhaps the greatest weapon in the company's PR arsenal, tweeted back, “Shameless pandering.”

I am not shy about my love of brown cars. My affection for ursine creatures is rather less well-known, but I do get exceptionally excited about bears. They're nature's men of leisure. The fuzzy lugs amble about, do whatever the hell they want, wear stylish fur and, if they're bothered, will kill you without compunction. And they take really, really long naps.

In truth, however, it wasn't the brown Santa Fe or the kid wrestling the bear that got me. It was the ad's subtlety, simplicity and smallness. It was the way the spot treated its subject matter; the way it liked itself and its protagonists.

The relationship between mother and son spoke to me as well. All too often, TV ads tend to play out the adversarial aspects of parent/child relationships or are meant to stoke the fires of worry. This mother wasn't out to protect her son from bullies. She was an ally in his quest to show them up.

What's more, the bullied kid wasn't an antisocial misfit like the questionable hero of Audi's “Prom” clip. He had a crew. A talented crew with diverse skills. His revenge wasn't sneaky or underhanded. The football-pilfering bullies suggested he assemble a team. He assembled a team.

What's interesting is that Hyundai filmed two endings and released both -- the short, 30-second version (which aired during the game) gives you all you need to know. The longer ad merely lingers a bit longer on the characters. But while the version that aired during the game features the lead bully being knocked backward by a ball with some serious gravy behind it, the long-form edit has him asking our protagonist's crew whether they'd prefer to play touch or tackle. The unanimous response, delivered with grim determination before the question's even finished? “Tackle.”

I prefer the concept of the long spot's kicker, but enjoyed the execution of the short ad's ending more. It's got just enough of the trademark Super Bowl-ad physical juvenilia without going over the top. The villain, after all, took the ball straight in the chest, rather than in a coarser, more wince-inducing part of his person.

And rather than trying to use music from say, The A-Team, The Bridge on the River Kwai or some other sort of let's-assemble-the-crew rag, Hyundai's creatives went with the Quiet Riot chestnut “Bang Your Head (Metal Health).” The track has absolutely nothing to do with what's happening onscreen, but the riff is tonally perfect. Plus, a good Kevin DuBrow reference is always worth a smile.

“Team” wasn't the best commercial of the big game -- for my money, the prize goes to Tide's Joe Montana-as-holy-artifact clip -- but it was a clever, heartfelt, skewed-slice-of-life ad that hit all the right notes.

It's self-aware but not overly slick, heartwarming without being schmaltzy and presents its product without making any grand claims about its abilities. The kids may have extraordinary skills and courage, but they're still being driven around by mom in a seven-passenger crossover.

The Santa Fe doesn't turn its owner into sexual dynamo or earn her a dance-off with Usher. It doesn't mend families ripped asunder by war or turn its occupants into biz-cas rastafarians. It picks up the kids and drops them off at the park.

In the world of this ad, the car doesn't make you; it's simply a tool. It's not what you drive, but how you drive it; a refreshing message from a company spending millions of dollars to get you to part with thousands.

By Davey G. Johnson