Hyundai answered a tourist's coquí insult by making its rental cars beep the frog's call

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.

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.

Replaced the rental car's lock beep with the coquí's call, so every lock and unlock repeats the dismissed sound through a channel the tourist cannot ignore.

The unlock beep fires dozens of times per trip, reaching the tourist automatically.

The sound is the car's own, so the tourist can't mute it without silencing the device.

Each lock repeats the coquí call, converting the insult into a self-reproducing rebuttal.

No argument is offered, so there's no row to feed or attention to the insult.

When an insult targets a sound, embed the rebuttal in a recurring functional sound of the device the offender uses, so they can't opt out.

Replacing the unlock beep with the coquí's call won the Audio & Radio Grand Prix at Cannes 2026 and continued after the win. 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.