Case study - Innocean USA

Successful last-minute digital support for a Super Bowl campaign.

Innocean USA is an advertising agency based in California that provides strategic planning, brand development, and digital marketing services to a variety of clients. They have expertise in industries such as automotive, technology, healthcare, and finance.

The wicked smaht award-winning Super Bowl campaign

Summary

Our team had the exciting task of integrating the Sonata Smart Park Super Bowl Campaign into the Hyundai website in a unique way. The humorous and clever concept of the campaign immediately caught our attention, and we were eager to tackle the challenge of seamlessly incorporating its spirit into the Hyundai website. This opportunity fueled our excitement even further.

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Challenge

Our main obstacle was the time constraint we had to execute our idea. We faced a strict time frame of just two weeks to create and perfect our concept, which included time for our development team to make the required adjustments to the site.

My role

In my role as the Senior UX Designer for this project, I was accountable for conducting research, developing wireframes and user flows, and working closely with stakeholders to design a user-centric experience that seamlessly integrated with the Smaht Pahk campaign. Additionally, I took on responsibilities as an interaction and product designer due to a resource constraint.

Strategy

I contacted various teams at Innocean to identify the entry points for users accessing the Hyundai website during the Smaht Pahk campaign. In a nutshell, we discovered that the main touchpoints of the campaign would direct users to the Sonata vehicle landing page, while secondary touchpoints would lead to the homepage of hyundaiusa.com.

We reviewed the two main ways users access the website and concentrated on optimizing those destinations. Our approach involved enhancing the Sonata vehicle landing page to handle a larger traffic volume. Here is the strategy we developed:

The homepage is a conduit to the vehicle landing page (VLP), so the experience here should be concise/focused and not require extended interaction.
VLP should be the primary engagement point for site visitors – after viewing the Super Bowl spot.
VLP campaign experience should align with the context and subject matter of the spot itself, in addition to other channels’ content strategy approaches.
Some users may not have seen the TV spot but would still like to educate themselves on the product. If the page is in a form they need help understanding, it may lead to confusion.

Userflow of touchpoints for the campaign

Solutions

Given that the Smaht Pahk campaign emphasized language, our team pondered how we could embody the distinct Boston dialect on the vehicle landing page. After multiple brainstorming sessions, we concluded that we would offer users the option to view the VLP content in either standard English or the signature “Boston way.”

Example of the interaction to change the page content to the Boston way.

Results

The Smaht Pahk campaign was a huge success, becoming the top-ranked Super Bowl ad of all time, not just in 2020.

The launch of Sonata was also a triumph, despite a shrinking market. We increased our market share by 15.9% and improved the consumer-facing transaction price by more than six times the industry average. This made Sonata the number one choice in its segment. During the week leading up to the Super Bowl, interest in Sonata soared by 229%, and this momentum continued for weeks afterward. Our ad for Sonata also had a remarkable recall rate of 9.5 points higher than the industry average.

The Hyundai Super Bowl ad for Sonata received unprecedented media coverage, breaking all previous records. It was consistently ranked as one of the top commercials, including a second-place ranking in the USA Today Ad Meter.

15.9%increase of market share
44Ksocial mentions
229%Model search volume
56.3MViews and counting
3169%lift in Sonata-related
page views on Cars.com

Social Validation

It was great reading people’s reactions to our portion of the campaign, with most people saying that what we did on the website was the “icing on the cake.”

Some of the best tweets about our solution we created

Awards

Conclusion

Despite the tight timeline and some sleepless nights, working on this project was a rewarding and enjoyable experience. It feels great to be recognized in the industry for our efforts.