#1082 2025 · Hyundai Puerto Rico & BBDO Puerto Rico · Automotive (rental)
Tourists called the coquí frog a nuisance, so Hyundai made its car beep the frog's call
the problem
A tourist's viral post called Puerto Rico's beloved coquí frog a nuisance and asked how to kill it
background
The coquí is a tiny frog endemic to Puerto Rico whose loud two-note call — co-quí — saturates the island's nights and stands as a cherished symbol of national identity and homecoming. In 2025 a tourist's viral posting described the frog as a nuisance and asked how to silence or kill it, and the dismissal of an emblem so close to Puerto Rican identity triggered an immediate wave of local outrage defending it.
The obvious response was to fight back in words: a PR statement, a campaign, an influencer reply arguing that the coquí matters. But arguing with a stranger who finds a sound annoying is a losing posture — each rebuttal extends the row and hands the insult its own attention. Hyundai needed the dismissal to be answered without a single argument the tourist could choose to ignore.
what everyone would do
Answer the tourist out loud: issue a statement, make a pro-coquí film, flood social media with defence. All of these fail for the same reason — a person who dismissed the frog can dismiss a rebuttal just as easily. Every reply extends the argument and pays attention to the insult, and the dismissing tourist simply scrolls past it, taking the outrage with them but changing nothing.
what they saw
Tell a tourist the coquí matters and they scroll on; wire its call into the car beep and every lock is a rebuttal they cannot decline. The answer was not delivered through a medium — it became the medium.
the move
Hyundai Puerto Rico, working with BBDO Puerto Rico and rental partners Avis, Enterprise and Charlie Car Rental, replaced the standard lock-and-unlock beep of its rental cars with an authentic recording of the coquí's call, and put cards in the vehicles explaining the frog's cultural and ecological significance. Every time a visitor locked or unlocked a Hyundai, the car itself repeated the very call the tourist had dismissed.
why it works
An argument asks for attention the listener is free to withhold; a functional product sound does not. The unlock beep fires dozens of times on a rental trip — at the moment the hand touches the key fob, the mind on something else — so the coquí call reaches the exact visitor who dismissed it through a channel that already commands their automatic attention. Because the sound is the car's own, the tourist cannot mute it without silencing the device they paid for, and each new renter, each new trip, re-lays the frog's presence again with no impression bought and no row to feed. A dismissal aimed at a sound was answered by making that sound unavoidable and significant from the visitor's own driving seat, converting a national insult into a repeated, self-reproducing act the whole island could share.
the payoff
Replacing the unlock beep with the coquí's call won the Audio & Radio Grand Prix at Cannes 2026 and continued after the win.
where it breaks
It works only when the victim's own product genuinely sits in the offender's hands — Hyundai had the physical rental cars the offending tourists were driving; a brand without such a recurring functional sound or device (a food label, a bank) has nothing to rewire. It depends on the insult being about a sound the product can carry; a complaint about price, quality or traffic would not be answered by a beep. And it saturates quickly: visitors who do not notice a car chirp are unreached, locals who already revere the frog gain nothing new, and once the offending audience leaves or the novelty wears thin the repeating call fades back into just another beep.
what came after
The gesture turned an insult the whole island felt into a point of pride repeated at every rental counter, and it became the lionised example of arguing with the product rather than with the person — the 2026 Cannes Audio & Radio Grand Prix was its proof of recognition.
references
- [1]Contagious (LIONS) — Cannes Lions 2026: Audio & Radio winnersContagious, 2026contagious.com
- [2]Reel 360 — Cannes Lions reveals first 2026 Grand Prix winnersReel 360, 2026reel360.com