fbpx

Eunique Jones Gibson’s Culture Brands Lands Big Multi-Year Hyundai Account, Becomes Automaker’s First Black Marketing Agency of Record

Eunique Jones Gibson’s Culture Brands Lands Big Multi-Year Hyundai Account, Becomes Automaker’s First Black Marketing Agency of Record

Culture Brands

Eunique Jones Gibson's Culture Brands Lands Big Multi-Year Hyundai Account, Becomes Automaker's First Black Marketing Agency of Record. Photo by Martin Katler on Unsplash.

Eunique Jones Gibson’s Culture Brands agency just got a major win in the automotive industry. The young marketing firm has become the first-ever Black agency of record for Hyundai Motor America.

Gibson – who is also the founder of “Because of Them We Can” – is living up to her own mantra by securing the historical account. Hyundai said Culture Brands was chosen from a pool of Black-owned agencies to help improve its reach in the market among Black buyers.

“Diversity and inclusion, and focusing on our diverse audiences, has been really part of the new fabric of Hyundai,” Hyundai Motor America’s Chief Marketing Officer Angela Zepeda told Ad Age. She added they only vetted Black agencies for this particular work because they are committed to “not only developing creative and marketing solutions for the African American target segment, but an agency that really knew about building culture.”

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 74: Jamarlin Martin

Jamarlin returns for a new season of the GHOGH podcast to discuss Bitcoin, bubbles, and Biden. He talks about the risk factors for Bitcoin as an investment asset including origin risk, speculative market structure, regulatory, and environment. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble?

It’s a description that’s fitting of Jones and her agency. After a 15-year advertising career in Corporate America, Gibson founded Culture Brands in 2017. She has used her expertise to grow “Because of Them We Can” from a 28-day Black History campaign to a popular site that showcases the best and brightest in Black news and culture.

Gibson also created the wildly popular game Culture Tags, which uses acronyms (much like social media hashtags) to describe various aspects of Black culture. Players have to guess what the acronym stands for based on clues given by the moderator.

The marketing maven expressed her excitement at working with Hyundai in a tweet on Thursday, May 6. “Some personal news…Looking forward to partnering w/@Hyundai to continue their goal of authentic & inclusive advertising & media spend within the African American community. PS. You already know what I’m pulling up in for the 1st official get together,” Gibson wrote.

Congratulatory wishes poured in immediately. “COME THRU!!! This is going to be amazing and this is a perfect partnership. LOVE TO SEE IT!” author Luvvie replied. “Hyundai is going to learn so much and hopefully will be setting a trend for other corporations,” user @misszanette added. “Congratulations, Eunique! They are in the BEST hands,” user @ShakirahAdianna wrote.

As the seventh-ranked automaker among Black consumers, Zepeda says Hyundai knows “we have lots of work to do, we could do so much better.” She believes the partnership with Gibson’s Culture Brands will give them the insight they need to grow and evolve to make headway with Black Americans.

“We had a lot of internal debates as a brand about how do we speak to this very important audience, so we seem like we are in tune, and honestly we needed experts to help us do that appropriately,” Zepeda said.

Gibson believes Culture Brands is up to the task. “Brands and organizations would come to us and would ask us to create culturally relevant content or sponsor the content we were creating and so I saw where the career that I once had and the path I was on really started to intersect,” Jones Gibson said, adding they work “with the intention of having our own owned and operated properties that allow us to constantly keep a pulse and stay engaged with the community but … also inform our campaign strategies and the creative we were making.”