Smaht Pahk
Hyundai2020
Smaht Pahk is a 2020 60-second television commercial for Hyundai, created by INNOCEAN USA, Huntington Beach.
The line
Bettah drives us.
Why it works
The new Sonata could slip into a tight space at the click of a button, but the feature had a forgettable name: Remote Smart Parking Assist. At Innocean USA a writer with Boston roots started saying “smart park” in his home accent, the room kept laughing, and that became the idea. Directed by Boston-area native Bryan Buckley on a cold, rainy South End street, it has Chris Evans and Rachel Dratch heckling a hopeless parallel parker until John Krasinski arrives in a Sonata to show off the trick, with David Ortiz joining in. It ran in the first quarter of Super Bowl LIV on February 2, 2020. It is studied as a feature demonstration that is the entire joke: every laugh repeats the product name. It finished second in USA Today’s Ad Meter, a whisker behind Jeep; Hyundai reports it topped Ace Metrix’s effectiveness ranking and drew more than 42 million YouTube views; and it won a Silver Effie in 2021.
Techniques
- Humour Boston accents turning 'smart park' into the title phrase become the running joke, so every laugh repeats the product name.
- Demonstration A Sonata slips into a tight parallel-parking space at the click of a button, showing the remote parking feature in action.
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