Sub-Optima

This isn't some ridiculously terrible commercial or anything. It's just kind of a mess.



I suspect this is what happens when there are six ideas in the pitch meeting and they just decide to use them all. My prevailing thought about this ad is that the first piece of the plotline, which depicts a couple handcuffed to a cop's motorcycle as the cop drives away in their Kia Optima, would probably have been sufficient by itself for the entire ad. You start with the couple driving, cop pulls them over, cop looks the car over and is taken by it, cop has the couple step out of the car, then hops in and drives away. Gets the point across, doesn't make wild, random lurches between events in something that can only charitably be called a narrative, and is at least conceptually amusing.

But does this ad stop there? No. In fact, it doesn't even start until right at the end of that piece of the plot. Instead, we move on to a helicopter grabbing the car with a giant suction cup and flying out across the ocean to deliver the car to some rich guy on a yacht. (Apparently this takes place in an alternate dimension where there is only one Kia Optima in existence, because surely with a base MSRP of around $20k, dude could afford his own. Hell, hiring that helicopter and fitting it out with the suction gadget probably cost more than that.) But does the yacht get to the rich guy? No. Because - watch the ad, this actually happens - fucking Poseidon pops out of the ocean, knocks the helicopter away, and examines the car.

Okay. I say this a lot on here, perhaps too much, but it's too often applicable: I know this is supposed to be funny. Or something. But I just find it stupid and "lookit me!" What use does Poseidon have for a car that he's like 20 times larger than? Or at all? Maybe it's just going to be a present for his daughter's Sweet Sixteen - not to drive, mind you, because they live under the sea, but to add to her collection of human items. She can admire the car as it slowly rusts, all the while humming "Part of Your World" and combing her hair with a dinglehopper. Or maybe this is kind of retarded and could just as easily have been left out, except that Kia apparently really wanted to show off more of their mediocre CGI.

Then aliens zap the car away, but they lose it as well, as the car is pulled through some sort of wormhole and ends up in Mayan times, ready to be worshiped as some sort of god. Okay. How do the Mayans know what a car is? What are they going to do with it?

So in 60 seconds the car is possessed by six different entities (I'm including the couple at the beginning, who technically have already been dispossessed before the 60 seconds start). Doesn't this seem a little frantic? Am I the only one who finds it sort of distracting and muddled? You'd think the idea of an ad like this would be to focus on the car, but in sixty seconds it seems to me that only about seven of them - 0:05 to 0:08, when the cop is driving, and 0:37 to 0:41, when the alien is driving - really show the car doing anything besides being pulled from one place to the next. A 60-second car commercial and barely more than 10% of it actually shows the car in action? (It could be worse, of course.)

That might even be okay if there were anything particularly distinctive about the Kia Optima... but it's a mid-size sedan, a.k.a. the most conventional automotive category in existence. Virtually every car in that category looks at least 80% like all the others, and the Optima hardly looks like an exception. It's not a hybrid, it's not electric... the only thing we know about it is that everyone in this ad wants it, which is hardly a convincing argument. Shit, even that awful Cruze ad cited the car's MPG. The only thing we get at the end is the starting price (which is only if you want it in manual, by the way). I mean, for all I know there are lots of awesome things you can get with the Kia Optima - for six million bucks, plus whatever it cost to produce, is it too much to ask that this ad mention any of them? Or should I just be thankful that no more hamsters showed up?

Hamstering it up

It's about time I got around to this one.



This ad, from early 2009 or so, is a good commercial. It's a clever use of interesting visuals to communicate, getting across the idea that the Kia Soul is distinct from the many cookie-cutter cars on the road. It even gets in a couple facts about the car at the end.

Unfortunately, Kia bought into the hamsters maybe a little too much.



What the hell is that mess?

It seems pretty clear that I'm not in this ad's target demographic (the references to 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue place the setting quite conspicuously in Harlem). But it's still baffling. First of all, Kia makes the pretty bold assumption that you remember their earlier hamster ad - it was a good ad, but it wasn't exactly "Have you had your break today?" Even beyond that, the two ads have virtually nothing in common beyond the hamsters - the hamster wheels make only a fleeting appearance in the sequel, the hamsters have now been dressed up in all manner of clothing, and Calvin Harris' "Colours" (an electronica song from 2007) has been replaced with Black Sheep's "The Choice is Yours" (a hip hop song from 1991). Really, why did they even bother to keep the hamsters? Surely the branding from the first commercial wasn't that valuable if they just threw out everything else.

Gone is the clever suggestion that the competition is like a bunch of identical hamster wheels; in its place are comparisons to a toaster and a cardboard box. Is this still supposed to represent the competition? Is it supposed to represent the used cars that might be the only other alternative for someone shopping in the Kia Soul's price range? It's impossible to say for sure when Kia is dealing entirely in metaphors. I don't know. Maybe if I lived in Harlem this ad would make perfect sense... but somehow I doubt that.

It's also worth noting that by giving the hamsters so much more to do, Kia has successfully called attention to the not-especially-good CGI they're employing in that department. The first ad seemed like it might have been mostly real hamsters until the end; I can't imagine there's a real hamster for even a frame in this commercial, and it's painfully obvious. Does that really matter? Probably not. But it looks cheap. I don't know, maybe that was the point.

Kia knows their history

Have you ever heard the name "Millard Fillmore"? Perhaps in a high school American History class where you were browsing the names of various presidents, his name might have caught your eye. He was the president sandwiched between Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce -- an unremarkable trio of minor American leaders, to be sure, but I really thought I knew the identity of Millard Fillmore -- that was, of course, until Kia had the good sense to tell me otherwise:



President Millard Fillmore...

Right! I knew it. He was president.

... best remembered as the first president to have a running water bathtub...

Wrong. Kia -- listen to me, you have to know this is fucking apocryphal. A tiny iota of research will prove this to be true. I mean, aren't there factcheckers you can hire to take a look at your shitty ads? Or maybe this is a "joke"? But, you just look stupid if it's a joke because you make this myth sound real.

The funny thing is, there's a large amount of comedic material about Millard Fillmore that isn't fake. For starters, he was a Whig. Just that very word is funny. Also, he was born in a log cabin. His first job was as a clothmaker. He started the White House library (he was a nerd! That's funny!) He had a third nipple and named it "Professor Milkington" (I just made this up, but it's funnier than the bath tub joke, and that's just a joke stolen from H.L. Mencken.)

The other stupid part about this concept is that there are plenty of more obscure presidents out there they could have used -- presidents that don't have well-known comic strips named after them. William Henry Harrison was president for 31 days. John Tyler didn't do a whole lot, and he was a "Democrat-Republican" (make up your mind for Pete's sake! Am I right?). Zachary Taylor wasn't in office for much more than a year, being the guy who died right before the ever-unheard-of Fillmore.

... he's unheard-of....

See, you say that, but I distinctly recall his name, and something about his being a goddam American president. We're anonymous here at the Ad Wizards, but I will go on record now as saying that my profession is not that of Presidential Historian. And yet, somehow, I'd heard of this guy. I'll grant you that he's an order of magnitude less famous than, say, George Washington, but can we agree that he's not exactly some small town Vermont Alderman from the early 19th century who died of typhus at age 58?

So we're honoring him during Kia's Unheard Of Presidents' Day Sale

Look, it's not that I'm some huge Millard Fillmore fan. Dude signed the Fugitive Slave Act -- that's bad juju. It's just that I think the people who made these ads are really, really stupid, and they've made the terrible assumption, like many advertisers sadly do, that Americans are as dumb as they are. Hey Kia? We're just not that retarded. Sorry.

To commemorate Millard's bathtime, we've created this Millard Fillmore soap-on-a-rope.

Can someone explain to me why this is funny? This simply appears to be more stupid pandering. We're not dumb enough to believe that an American President can truly be "unheard of," and we're not dumb enough to find that kind of goofy, punny humor funny. I can't wait for this to go off the air next week.

So, who wants to go buy a car on Monday?

Kia van Winkle

Did everyone at Kia's ad agency just come out of a 20-year coma?



I realize that Flashdance is still reasonably well-known, but it came out in 1983. That's nearly 25 years ago. Way to be relevant there, Kia. Also, is it me or is this really just kind of creepy? Would you buy a car from a frantically dancing salesperson who was pouring sweat? The whole "selling like he's never sold before" lyric is a little strange as well. Here's the thing, Kia: if I'm interested in buying a car from you, I don't really care how well your sales guy is doing at meeting his monthly quota. I'm interested in, you know, the car. Maybe you could have told me something about them besides their names? That might have been useful. Instead of the exotic dance moves from a quarter-century ago and the mailed-in song parody.

Maybe the problem is just that Kia has no idea what year it is. Check out this ad for Kia Fest '06:



Kia. Seriously. It is not 1984. I don't want to see Kia Fest '08 videos featuring breakdancing or some salesperson re-enacting the warehouse scene from Footloose, okay? It's the 21st century. Get with the program.