Stinger Zinger: Kia Super Bowl Ad Packs Biggest Shopping Punch

CARS.COM — While Nick Foles and company piled 41 points on the New England Patriots last night, consumers piled about 41 times the Cars.com traffic to the Kia Stinger in the minutes after the brand’s Super Bowl commercial aired. The 60-second spot — in which Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler hustled Kia’s new sports sedan ’round a racetrack in reverse while racing champ Emerson Fittipaldi looked on — garnered 4,053 percent more traffic on Cars.com just after it aired in the third quarter.

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That put the Stinger atop 10 other gametime automotive ads by a landslide, judging by traffic trends to Stinger-related research and inventory pages on Cars.com in the 8 minutes that followed each ad versus the 8 minutes that preceded it.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles ran five commercials — two for Ram pickup trucks and three for the Jeep Cherokee and Wrangler SUVs. Toyota ran four ads: two spots around its sponsorship of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, one for the Tundra pickup and one for the Lexus LS luxury sedan. Hyundai ran a single in-game ad, which spotlighted its donations to pediatric cancer research.

Movie tie-ins were in heavy rotation, with Lexus and Jeep co-opting the silver screen for their spots. They worked: Lexus used characters from Marvel Studios’ upcoming “Black Panther” in a spot for the LS sedan, and 921 percent more LS traffic on Cars.com followed the ad. And after Jeep reprised Jeff Goldblum’s iconic Wrangler getaway from “Jurassic Park” for a table-turning remake with the redesigned 2018 Wrangler, 542 percent more traffic sped the iconic off-roader’s way.

Lexus and Jeep ranked Nos. 2 and 3, respectively, in traffic increases for the minutes that followed each ad. The Wrangler’s fourth-quarter river-and-rocks ad ranked No. 4, with a 383 percent increase in traffic, while the Cherokee’s earlier highways-to-backwoods spot came in fifth with a 175 percent lift.

Here’s how the rest shook out:

• Toyota’s Tundra ad, in which apparent clergymen from four faiths find commonality over a football game, added 142 percent.
• FCA’s Vikings-themed spot for Ram pickups, where a cadre of Norsemen blast Queen en route to Minneapolis before seeing the matchup, lifted traffic 69 percent. (No doubt a few Minnesota Vikings fans still thought it too soon.)
• Hyundai’s “Hope on Wheels” commercial, in which Hyundai owners learned they helped fund cancer research, added 59 percent.
• FCA’s Martin Luther King Jr.-themed spot for the Ram — controversial because it excerpts a sermon in which King also railed against consumerism for “Cadillacs and Chryslers” that people couldn’t afford — added 55 percent.
• Toyota’s two Olympics-themed spots added 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively.

New cars also made cameo appearances in other ads, from a Genesis G80 that opened one of Tide’s many commercial spoofs to a Lamborghini Urus midway through a spot for Monster headphones. But the dedicated spots didn’t necessarily pay off as far as full-day traffic goes. Versus traffic to vehicle pages during the prior four Sundays, traffic to the Ram 1500 fell 7 percent on Super Bowl Sunday; it also fell 16 percent for the Cherokee and 19 percent for the Tundra. But it increased for the Wrangler (up 32 percent), LS (up 92 percent) and Stinger (up 155 percent).

See more Super Bowl car ads here.

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