Brands and companies on twitter can be funny, but they can also be a bit irritating. Their attempts at marketing disguised as humour can be good for a sensible chuckle, but often times it falls flat and turns out to be rather cringe-inducing.
Cadillac recently made such an attempt at Millenial-focused humour on twitter. The folks behind at the luxury brand’s twitter account went all-out for Valentine’s day yesterday, sending out a series of flirtatious tweets to Cadillac’s various rivals in the luxury vehicle space including Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Jaguar and BMW.
The tweets started out pretty tame, with Cadillac tweeting “long distance can be difficult, but we can make it work,” to Mercedes-Benz and “is your GPS working? Because we’re lost in your headlights,” to BMW. Things got out of hand when Jaguar decided to reply to Cadillac’s tweet that simply said “meow” with “should we Escalade this to the next level?” This prompted Cadillac to reply “just don’t leave scratch marks,” followed by a winking emoji face. Yikes.
Oh @JaguarUSA, you dog. https://t.co/gR6hoaJGZ0
— Cadillac (@Cadillac) February 14, 2019
Lexus also saw this as an opportunity to return fire at Cadillac with “aren’t you a bit old for us? *swipe left*.”
Unfortunately, we’re not so sure Cadillac’s joke (or the other brands’ jokes) landed. It’s nice to see Cadillac loosen up a bit and have some fun after years of the stiff and self-serious ‘Dare Greatly’ ads, but this series of tweets reads like a series of sexually charged drunk texts. Twitter seemed to respond positively to the Valentine’s Day campaign, though, with the tweets generating a good amount of engagement – especially compared to your average tweet from the Cadillac account.
Cadillac appointed a new chief marketing officer last year, Deborah Wahl, who previously worked in advertising at Ford, Lexus and Chrysler. Most recently, the brand’s advertising has focused on the XT4 compact crossover, and will soon turn to focus on the new XT6 mid-size as well.
Comments
We live in a cringey, branded dystopia.
You’ve just noticed? It wasn’t like the 90’s when people were smart and rejected corporate intrusion in their private lives.
Nowadays, people want to live inside a brand like it was a lifestyle. It’s messed up.
Guys, very funny. I read it on carbuzz and shared it on twitter.
The CT5 Vs with the Corvette engine is not out yet. Should we Escalade? Is the engine going to roar for long distance relationships?
Sorry, some brands do Tweet marketing very well – (Arby’s, Bud Light, Old Spice, etc) – Cadillac has some catching up to do if they wanna play in the best of the best arena. These were cringe-worthy.
It was Cadillac’s attempt to ingratiate themselves with the cool kids. Everybody knows they are not legitimate competitors for any of those brands. Cadillac should’ve tried to toy with other flunkie brands like Acura instead.
The only one that struck me as humorous was Lexus’s Tinder-inspired response, ‘Aren’t you a little old for us?
*Swipe left*’
Not great when Lexus takes you down.
Tesla’s good @ Twitter too – don’t see their response.
But Cadillac has the prestige of being one of the oldest names in luxury autos, such as Mercedes and BMW.
Kinda awkward & sounds like drunk tweeting indeed.
Although funny, it was more of a marketing ploy to let the die hard fans from the competitors know that Cadillac is here to play too.
Hey Barra. Instead of these gimmicks, why don’t you come out with some impressive product that will generate buzz for Cadillac? A once proud luxury marque that is now an also-ran needs to redouble its efforts on coming out with amazing product and skip the games.
Cadillac is an icon that wrote the book on the luxury motorcars. They have some new and exciting models that are the bench mark for others to follow…