Kia Soul EV - Hamster Electric Lady / Animals - (2015) :90 (USA)

Please, KIA client, read this. You need to stop it with the hamsters now. It's getting too weird. I've honestly hated every hamster ad, except this one, where the hamster wheel idea is a visual pun on an expression, enlarged to a quirky ad idea.
Everything after that was just large hamsters driving cars, without understanding what made the first idea a successful one. You often see clients do this "well that ad went well, so lets have some life-sized hamsters and popular music again, please" and we're served everything from Lady Gaga to Maroon 5 with hamsters. Totally missing the original idea. It's not about giant hamsters and music. It was about breaking the norm. Shaking loose from the mundane commute. Being a different car. That was the original idea, the hamsters were just showing it.

Now the hamsters are your usual stereotypes of lab rats (heh), engineering an EV. The hamsters even own a pet hamster who somehow gets into the lab area and turns into a sleek & sexy leggy hamster woman, in a leather catsuit. Excited about their ability to create sexy hamster ladies, our hamster-lab-team drive to the nearest pet store to get more pets. This is the client insisted-upon car in action shots that need to be done, both to and from the pet store just to make you see the car. Then the lab-hamsters make more hamster ladies, which makes the original hamster lady so happy that she has a harem of friends to dance with, instead of insanely pissed off that her owner just ditched her to get more hamsters, that they all break out in choreographed dancing. Ho-kay.

This is not breaking away from the norm, people. This is not being original. This is the usual sexist drivel, with women as eye-candy in car ads, just served by hamsters. We even have our token hamster in the mix, as I sincerely believe the clients insisted on a rastafarian hamster to fulfill a quota. Please let the hamster-campaign die and hire some marketing people that understand the difference between an idea and an execution asap. This anthropomorphic sexism is getting into weird beastiality territory and I am flabbergasted you ever approved this shite. Seriously, KIA, what were you thinking?

Music: “Animals“ by Maroon 5
First air date: – MTV VMAs

Agency: David&Goliath
Founder & Chairman: David Angelo
Chief Creative Officer: Colin Jeffery
Creative Director/Copywriter: Matthew Curry
Associate Creative Director/Art Director: Kristian Grove Møller
Copywriter: Courtney Pulver
Art Director: Michael JF Wilson
Executive Producer, Managing Director: Carol Lombard
Executive Producer: Paul Albanese
President: Brian Dunbar

Production Company: @radical.media
Director: Colin Jeffery
Director of Photography: Toby Irwin; 2nd Unit DP: Greg Baldi
Production Designer: Tom Foden
Special EFX: Legacy Effects