Kia Soul’s TV Hamster Commercial receives the 2010 Silver EFFIE Award

The Kia Soul hamster commercial has been receiving raves not only from viewers and car owners but also from a number of award-giving organizations.

It was recently honored as the Nielsen “Automotive Ad of the Year” for effectively gaining positive consumer recollection.

It takes creativity and pure genius to come up with a TV commercial that can stand out from so many commercials and be remembered by the viewers.

Both the TV commercial and the vehicle itself, the 2010 Kia Soul five-door urban passenger vehicle, are uniquely styled and reaping so many awards. Recently, the American Marketing Association based in New York awarded its Silver EFFIE Award to the cool and hip Kia TV hamster commercial.

The EFFIE Awards (short for effective) annually select and honor the most effective advertising campaigns in the United States. Kia Soul’s television commercial won the EFFIE in the “David vs. Goliath” category. As the title of the award implies, it cites smaller, new or emerging brands that stood up to challenge industry leaders head-on.

Quite appropriately, the TV commercial was created by David&Goliath media outfit for Kia. The hip commercial shows an entire city and suburban streets inhabited by hamsters who senselessly run in place inside their exercise wheels.

A Molten Red Kia Soul then pulls up and hip-hopping hamsters inside the Soul roll down the window as they tap to the music inside the car. These hamsters seem to have discovered “A New Way to Roll” as they bob their heads to the beat of loud music coming from the Soul’s highly specified audio system that includes pulsating speaker lights. The hamsters are listening to four different music tracks that appear in slightly different versions.

Michael Sprague, marketing vice president of Kia Motors America, talks about Soul. “Designed to offer consumers a ‘new way to roll’ with a distinct style and a number of personalization options, Soul is aimed at the young and young-at-heart looking for a vehicle perfectly suited to their personalities”

Sprague then talks about the TV commercial. “The hamsters’ immediate popularity helped position Soul as Kia’s halo vehicle and showcased the brand’s emerging signature design direction, which, along with quality, safety and value, has propelled Kia to tier-one status.”

Regarding the EFFIE Awards, renowned business leaders from different parts of the globe serve as judges. The winners were selected over two evaluation rounds as all the entries were analyzed on a stand-alone basis. They were then compared against the other category finalists.

Different judging criteria were intended to determine the overall market effectiveness of each entry. The commercials and ad campaigns were evaluated and given four scores in different areas such as Strategic Challenge and Objectives, Overall Idea, Bringing the Idea to Life, and Results.

And because the first hamster commercial did extremely well, Kia gave the hamsters an encore appearance in the Soul’s new ad, “This or That”. Again created and helmed by David&Goliath, the second Kia Soul TV ad features the hip hamsters cruising the suburban streets, this time to the tune of the hip-hop hit, “The Choice is Yours” by The Black Sheep. The ad points to “This,” the funky, Alien Green Soul they are driving, or “That,” a number of mundane appliances on wheels, cardboard boxes or hamster wheels.