Kia’s Super Bowl Binky Dad Spot Beats GM, Stellantis For Sparking Web Traffic

If clicks tell the story, reaction to the four auto commercials airing during the Super Bowl ranged from meh to yeah with a devoted dad’s wild ride to fetch his baby’s binky sparking the most action on auto buying and research site Cars.com.

Interestingly, some brands that didn’t even advertise benefited from those that did—in particular, automakers promoting electric vehicles.

To capture its data, Cars.com analyzes site traffic patterns for advertised car model pages during the eight minutes before each spot aired and again eight minutes after.

The results weren’t even close. Kia’s “Binky Dad” spot for its Telluride X-Pro All-Terrain AWD SUV had viewers pounding the keys with a 230% increase in the brand’s page on Cars.com. The spot featured a dad high-tailing in his Telluride through a myriad obstacles at break-neck speed to retrieve his baby’s “binky,” a pacifier. He grabs it, speeds back to baby and mom only to have the baby spit out the green binky as mom informs dad baby only likes the blue one.

“It’s a great consumer insight around a massive life stage change for men in general,” observed Cars.com chief marketing officer Jennifer Vianello in an interview. Parents aren’t that enthusiastic about moving into their parent car, even though they know it’s a reality. So we got the Telluride which is stylish. The other thing that I have going forward is that those cars are available for purchase, which a lot of these other vehicles are not.

Kia’s was the only spot of the four that didn’t feature electric vehicles.

General Motors Co.’s “Why Not an EV-GM x Netflix” stimulated a 50% jump in traffic on its pages. The commercial featured comic actory Will Ferrell driving GM Evs through a series of scenes from shows and movies streaming on Netflix.

Right behind with a 46% increase in traffic was a spot for the new electric Ram 1500 REV pickup truck titled “Premature Electrification.” The commercial mimicked those ubiqitous commercials for erectile dysfunction medications, assuring viewers when they drive an electric RAM 1500 REV they won’t run out of, well energy prematurely.

The other Stellantis brand’s commercial found few dance partners. The Jeep 4xe “Electric Boogie” featured animals slithering and dancing in concert with the movments of the electric Jeep 4xe to the bopping beats of the “Electric Boogie Woogie.” Cute spot but it only stimulated a 13% increase in traffic on that brand’s Cars.com page.

While the three EV-themed spots may not have won a lot of new traffic on their brands’ Cars.com pages, they did spark some collateral benefit for their competitors.

For instance, according to Cars.com data, while Ford Motor Co. didn’t advertise at all during the big game its EV page views saw a 118% increase in EV engagement on the site coming from RAM’s “Premature Electrification” ad and a 146% boost on Cars.com during GM’s “Why not an EV?” ad.

Indeed, with 75% of auto ads during the game promoting electric vehicles Cars.com saw a 21% increase in EV page views across its site and apps.

“In advertising in general there is something that’s you know, called in the industry, halo effect so that’s not atypical for one brand in a category to halo another brands when they advertise,” said Vianello.

Oddest of all is the bump Tesla received from other brand’s EV spots. The electric car brand saw a 26% increase during Jeep’s “Electric Boogie” and, unrelated to any brand’s commercials, a 29% bump when Tesla CEO Elon Musk was shown in the stands.

“I think clearly, you know, what we see in that is that Tesla is very linked in consumers minds with the electric vehicle market. So that is actually a really great lesson for Tesla that for the time being at least they are going to benefit from any interest in the electric vehicle market. As as their competitors launch new electric vehicles, Tesla is probably going to find itself in the consideration set more often than than not,” noted Vianello.

So is it worth it for an automaker to shell out millions to advertise in the Super Bowl when a company like Tesla scores free coverage just by nature of its controversial CEO simply showing up?

“I would say generally, the answer for the Super Bowl specifically remains yes,” asserts Vianello. “If it’s a well done spot, I mean, I don’t necessarily know if I believe that that was an effective use of money for every single one of the auto spots that we saw. I think clearly it was for Kia.”