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I know a guy who works for Hyundai in Australia. As a manager involved in Hyundai's new car regional distributions, there are some pretty sweet perks he gets to enjoy. A shiny new Hyundai (not the Getz, mind you) and the opportunity to attend various sporting and high profile events that Hyundai sponsors around the country. I like to hear about his perks, and sometimes I also like to dream about me being him. For his privacy, I'm going to refer to him as Han (see Tokyo Drift).

Now multinational companies like Hyundai, where Han works, don't have everything run through their head office. They run regional offices with managers who are tasked to specialise in culture, trends and laws of various regions. So marketing that we see in Australia isn't actually a reflection of Korean principles when it comes to Kia and Hyundai adverts. They are crafted by Australian media companies and approved by Hyundai's (or Kia's) regional offices.

Now I just had a bit of a poke at a Kia advert, but that was more a case of state governments not really thinking about the subliminal message that people might be getting from anti-public transport adverts being shown on public transport sites. Near the beginning of the year, Hyundai in Europe approved and released an advert for a new fuel cell car they were releasing. If you don't know much about fuel cells, its basically an electric car that gets power by using a tank of compressed liquid Hydrogen, and combining that with Oxygen from the air to generate electricity from the resulting fusion to drive electric motors. The description is simplified, but thats the idea. The result produced is heat and water. No harmful gases.

The end result is that the advertising company struck upon the idea of showing how suicide via CarbonMonoxide poisoning would now not be possible in this car. Probably sounds like a good idea if you say it once really quickly, but the public reaction, amplified by the media, resulted in Hyundai pulling the advert and issuing apologies in every country that they sell cars, not just Europe. You just hope that the people involved in that creative process are learning lessons.

This has nothing to do with Han though. I just still like his job.