If you haven’t heard, Hyundai’s luxury car brand Genesis had a great year. Sales are up, to the point of surpassing their pre-pandemic levels a year earlier, which is not something that can be said about all automotive brands. These increasing sales parallel what we’ve been seeing in Genesis ad trends.
Genesis Ad Airing Data
In November 2020, we saw 5,622 individual ad airings from Genesis, that’s compared to only 4,046 the year before. The numbers were almost identical in December at 5,660 and 4,354. Though not to the same extent, January 2020 also saw an increase in airings from Genesis as compared to the year before.
There are a couple of things that could be going on here. First, South Korea has been relatively successful at keeping their Coronavirus cases under control and since the peninsula accounts for the plurality of their manufacturing centers they have been able to keep production high. This means that they have more supply than most car companies and have been able to capitalize on that. Second, Korean car brands such as Kia and Hyundai have been experiencing a lot of good press and sales have been increasing generally, so Genesis might have just been poised to have good year, regardless of supply chains.
In February, airings dropped precipitously, as compared to the previous three months. Perhaps this was part of their advertising plan, but in plotting the airings by day in February there is a noticeable drop around the time of the Tiger Woods car crash. It’s certainly possible this drop was planned, as they were sponsoring the tournament Woods was hosting, but it’s also possible they cancelled some advertising because of all the press coverage surrounding the Genesis Woods was driving. We will continue to monitor Genesis ad trends to see if this dip was reactionary or solely a coincidence. The brands specific model that had been driving the sales surge in January was the SUV GV80, which has seen over 2,000 airings year to date. This model was released in the Fall of 2020 and was the exact model Tiger Woods was driving.
