Kia's giant hamsters are back, and this time they're culturally sensitive

Love them or hate them, Kia's hamsters are back after a nearly two-year absence from the airwaves -- and they're smilier and more diverse than ever.

A new commercial features the exuberant oversized rodents blending styles of music from all over the world into a single upbeat melody as they lead excited New Yorkers running to Central Park for a dance party.

The hamsters -- a long-running gag to promote the South Korean auto brand's Soul model -- are here to shill the latest iteration of the diminutive SUV. 

In the years since their last appearance -- in which they turned a lab experiment into a dance party -- ad agency David&Goliath has kept a watchful eye on social media and pop culture in search of some sort of zeitgeist the animals could latch onto.

What its creative team saw apparently wasn't too heartening. 

"There's a lot of cultural divide at the moment," said Colin Jeffery, David&Goliath's chief creative officer. 

"Just looking at the general state of affairs globally, there is definitely this tension and this divide that we're all seeing in the newspapers, online, in politics, wherever."

The agency thought the world could use an uplifting pick-me-up that celebrated individuality and drew from a host of cultures. 

But Jeffery was well aware that such a proposal could easily veer into kitschy, culturally appropriative sap if not handled carefully. 

To avoid that, the agency brought on three ethnomusicologists from Harvard and UCLA to make sure the wardrobes and instruments were true to life.

"I had this fear that if we did anything incorrectly, we'd have the adverse effect and instead of bringing everyone together we'd just piss people off," Jeffery said. "There's been a lot of instances recently in advertising -- and in pop culture -- where cultures have been represented badly."

Part of the reason for the long gap between the hamster commercials is that the ads take a good deal longer than the average spot to animate and produce. 

In this case, the music production company the agency hired faced the daunting task of syncing 25-30 diverse instruments into some kind of coherent bluegrass tune.

"To try and do that when you've got sitars and bagpipes and banjos -- a lot of these instruments weren't designed to work together," Jeffery said.

Kia's hamsters started as a play on the banal existence of nine-to-fivers in the rat race, but evolved over the years into fun-loving cartoonish partiers. Seven years since they were introduced, the agency says they remain as popular as ever according to market research.

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