Rafa-Led Kia Sportage Work Blends X-Men Partnership & Aussie Open Sponsorship

In a repeat of its 2015 strategy, Kia again links its X-Men Apocalypse movie tie-in with its top tier Australian Open tennis tournament sponsorship in a new campaign fronted by Rafael Nadal.

This initiative sees the auto brand blend properties from its entertainment partnership and sports sponsorship portfolios into a single athlete ambassador led campaign themed around the idea that the reason Nadal is so good is that he has ‘supernatural, mutant powers’.

The global initiative, which promotes the launch of the Korean car marque’s new Sportage model, sees the athlete endorser front content that transforms the car into several ‘X-Cars’ for the 2016 Australian Open.

It is led by a 60-second commercial – ‘Kia & X-MEN : Secret Of Right Arm In Australian Open’ – includes clips of Rafa playing tennis, scenes from the upcoming film and the Australian Open logo.,

The global ad comes in multiple language variants including Arabic, French, Russian and Nadal’s own native Spanish.

The commercial began rolling out worldwide in the first week of January across multiple TV channels and was also posted to the Kia Motors Worldwide YouTube channel on 3 January (since when in total it has racked up more than 250,000-plus views in its first 48 hours).

The campaign spans multiple channels and platforms and content pieces – particularly on Twitter –

#KiaNow MT @RafaelNadal El regreso de #Nadal y #KiaXcar para @AusOpen2016. Muy emocionado! @Kia_Motors #Kia pic.twitter.com/DbAOx16TY0

— Kia Motors Global (@Kia_Motors) December 31, 2015

which reveal that Kia has actually created several X-Cars based on various comic book characters including Cyclops and Mystique (the Mystique version being the official car for the 2016 Aussie Open).

#KiaNow MT @XMenFilms Mystique-themed #Kia #Sportage debuts @ the 2016 Australian Open https://t.co/xtIZ37xpBM pic.twitter.com/vgsD7xCiyF

— Kia Motors Global (@Kia_Motors) December 28, 2015

All pieces try to drive viewers to explore more details of Kia X-Car online at both the campaign’s digital hub at https://www.allaboutsportage.com/#/intl/KiaXcar (and at the car-specific site at https://allaboutsportage.com/).

Plus there is a ‘making of’ style webfilm about the development of the X-men vehicle itself.

Comment

While we feel that this commercial is somewhat scrambled, it nevertheless reflects the ongoing trend for brands to mix properties from their partnership portfolios into a wider entertainment blend that aims to appeal to a wider audience.

This particular tripartite partnership – blending both a sports and an entertainment property into a single piece of endorser-led sponsorship activation – is actually continuation of last year’s Kia campaign at the 2015 Australian Open (see previous case study).

Links

Kia Motors Worldwide YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/KiaBUZZ

Kia Motors Worldwide Google +:

https://plus.google.com/u/1/+KiaMotorsWorldwide/posts

Kia Motors Worldwide Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/Kiamotorsworldwide

Kia Motors Worldwide Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/kiamotorsworldwide/

Kia Motors Worldwide Twitter:

https://twitter.com/kia_motors

Kia Motors Web: