Fountain Valley-based Hyundai Motor America doesn’t plan to alter its advertising push as it searches for a new head of marketing.
The automaker, part of South Korea’s Hyundai Kia Automotive Group, named Christopher Perry interim head of marketing last month after Joel Ewanick, former vice president of marketing, jumped ship to Tennessee-based Nissan North America Inc., part of Japan’s Nissan Motor Co.
Under Ewanick’s tenure, Hyundai expanded its advertising reach and launched its assurance program, which launched in late 2008 and allows buyers to return an auto if they lose their jobs or face other hardships, to grab market share during the downturn.
Ewanick was named 2009 Marketer of the Year by trade journal Advertising Age for his work in promoting Hyundai through much of the downturn.
Ewanick helped develop Hyundai’s media strategy of advertising at big events such as the Oscars and the Super Bowl at a time when many other automakers stopped paying to promote themselves.
Perry, who had been the director of marketing communications for Hyundai, is the front runner for Ewanick’s spot, although Hyundai also is looking outside its organization.
Perry might have a hard time following in Ewanick’s footsteps as the slowly recovering economy will make advertising at big events more expensive.
The automaker spends about $450 million in advertising annually, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a unit of London-based ad agency WPP Group PLC, and has been very aggressive in marketing its various vehicle launches.
Perry plans to stick to the strategy Ewanick helped put in place three years ago to promote the brand, but with more emphasis on digital and social media strategies.
Freedom Pushes Mobile
Want to access the Orange County Register from your iPhone? There is an app for that this month and more to come.
Freedom Interactive, the interactive arm of Irvine-based Freedom Communications Inc., is set to launch a series of applications for mobile devices as part of its move into mobile media.
Freedom teamed up with Kansas City, Mo.-based Handmark Inc. to develop and support mobile apps for Freedom’s various newspapers and TV stations.
The first app, which launched earlier this month, lets users read stories and watch videos posted on the Register’s Web site.
As part of the launch, Freedom teamed up with Japan’s Honda Motor Co. Users who download the app for their smartphones will have the opportunity to register for a chance to win a free Honda Insight hybrid sedan.
The Register’s app might be the first for Freedom, but all of the company’s other newspapers and TV stations will have mobile apps in the next two months, according to Claus Enevoldsen, director of interactive marketing for Freedom.
Freedom is set to launch apps for CBS affiliate WPEC-TV 12 in West Palm Beach, Fla., the Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo., and The Daily Press in Victorville by the end of the month.
The apps will be available across all mobile browsers and smartphone devices, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Google Android and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile devices.
“We’re going where the audience is and the audience has been fragmented so we need to be on all of these platforms,” Enevoldsen said.
Though sales of mobile phones have been down in the past year, the market looks to be on the upswing due to cheaper smartphones, according to a study by Connecticut-based research firm Gartner Inc.
The study also predicted that mobile phones will overtake personal computers as the dominant Web access device worldwide by 2013.
The number of mobile Web users worldwide is expected to more than double from 450 million in 2009 to more than a billion by the end of 2013, according to a forecast issued by Massachusetts market intelligence company Interactive Data Corp.
Social Media
Social media marketing has been a bit of a game changer for advertising and public relations agencies in the past two years.
Social media and the Internet have increasingly muddied the line between advertising agencies and public relations companies.
“Social media is one of these things that has blurred the responsibility,” said Jim Harrington, president of Newport Beach-based O’Leary and Partners. “You have general advertising agencies pitching it, you have PR agencies pitching it and you have digital agencies pitching it because it’s an online thing.”
As companies have cut back on marketing budgets and consolidated accounts during the downturn, many ad shops are looking to expand into social media to keep clients.
“We’re all expanding into new services to go deeper with our clients,” said Rebecca Hall, chief executive of Costa Mesa-based Idea Hall.
While many local ad shops haven’t yet competed against public relations firms for accounts, they see this as a future possibility.
“I’ve not had any situations where we have bumped heads with an ad agency with one of our clients or a prospect,” said Hilary Kaye, president of Irvine-based HKA Inc. “But I could see how others might.”
