GM is significantly shaking up its advertising partners, hiring an assortment of new creative and media agencies to handle several key marketing aspects while keeping some of the “old guard” ad agencies for certain parts of its promotional strategy.
The General is looking outside Detroit for many of its new ad creators, ranging as far afield as both U.S. coasts and Texas as it tries bring new blood to a challenging sales environment, as Ad Age reports.
Ad content creation will now be handled by a lineup of new ad agencies, including Media.Monks, Preacher, Mother, 72andSunny, and Anomaly, with as many as 16 different companies contacted by GM during its advertising review. According to Molly Peck, the automaker’s Global Chief Transformation Officer, GM “selected the very best-in-class agencies in the entire world.”
According to Peck, the company will move away from an “agency of record” or AOR model of advertising in which a specific agency is authorized to handle an enterprise’s advertising for it. Instead, GM will set an advertising strategy, and then “a roster of agencies” will execute “the creative vision—the brand, the look, the tone, the feel, the major campaigns” to give customers new ads in “a very fast, efficient and prolific way.”
Molly Peck
Some of the “old guard” agencies will continue to have roles to play, such as Commonwealth/McCann, which will develop future international Chevy ad campaigns. Commonwealth/McCann created the “Together Let’s Drive” tagline for Chevy, an advertising slogan that also calls for unity at a time of strong U.S. political division.
Part of GM’s quest for a more flexible, customized, and varied ad development process seems to be a response to the challenge of marketing electric vehicles at a time when nearly half of previous American EV buyers are returning to ICE vehicles, but GM continues its mission to drastically expand its electric vehicles sales.
Norm de Greve
GM began its ad agency assessment at the start of this year, following its appointment of Norm de Greve as senior vice president and chief marketing officer last July. Molly Peck assumed the mantle of General Motors’ global transformation officer, following years of marketing experience at Buick and GMC, in April of this year and immediately began work on changing GM’s marketing operations to align better with the needs of the times.
General Motors spent $2.9 billion in U.S. advertising in 2023, a major chunk of its $3.6 billion global advertising budget, though the amount is down 10 percent year over year, according to Ad Age.
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Comments
Or do the easier thing. Make cars people are EXCITED about and actually want to spend their hard earned (now harder than ever) money on.
You think that’s easy? It’s much easier to produce crap and then convince people they want it. 95% of the car models made by every manufacturer are models I wouldn’t want to own.
when everyone has to follow the same gov’t regulations, everyone makes the same look-a-like cars
They can blow all the money that want on advertising, ain’t nobody buying EV nonsense from GM other than a handful of bicyclists, virtue signalers and people who couldn’t afford a Tesla.
“GM “selected the very best-in-class agencies in the entire world.” – LOL. You can smell the overpriced political correctness coming from those brain trusts clear to the moon. I’d also wager both my kids that every one of those agencies is going to have a senator or a congressman on the board.
Well, hopefully these companies are better than Sweet Baby, Inc. and S&P Global.
EVs are hardly nonsense. And rather obviously you’re ignorant about Tesla pricing too. There are lots of reasons to not buy a Tesla, but price isn’t one of them.
I just wanna say she looks very under the influence
Loved the old Led Zeppelin Cadillac commercials!
If you want a guide on how to do proper car commercials look at the 80s Chevy, Pontiac, Cadillac commercials. All of them explained what they were meant to be and their jingles lasted a lifetime. Another was the Dodge commercials of the 90s and today’s Subaru commercial with the Barkley family.
so having the agencies check DEI boxes didn’t work… this move won’t help
So this means that hundreds of legacy ad agency employees based in Detroit are sent FOB Sidewalk. This smells like the idiotic decision a few years back to move Cadillac HQ to New York (and then back to dumpy Warren, MI).
The car companies should have made hybrids a priority as the next step.