16730: Delayed WTF 61—General Motors, General Market, General Mayhem.

 

MultiCultClassics is often occupied with real work. As a result, a handful of events occur without the expected blog commentary. This limited series—Delayed WTF—seeks to make belated amends for the absence of malice.

 

GM Authority reported on the General Motors multi-car wreck, whereby the automaker decided to roll with a new line of White advertising agencies.

 

There are key issues in the GM fiasco that warrant rants, including:

 

• The GM Global Chief Transformation Officer gushed the car company “selected the very best-in-class agencies in the entire world.” Um, GM can’t manage to produce best-in-class vehicles, so their ability to identify best-in-class White advertising agencies should be questioned for sure.

 

• The corporation that took full advantage of a bailout in 2008 is now bailing out of Detroit—at least in terms of advertising—effectively decimating the Midwest marketing community. The destruction will include shops literally fabricated to exclusively service GM—as well as workers who ran the promotional assembly lines. Social media voices are reacting to the sad situation, along with even sadder regional White advertising agencies.

 

• In most of the trade journal content, there were no mentions of non-White advertising agencies affected by the GM move. On a related tip, does Shaquille O’Neal—co-founder of multicrumbtual marketing firm Majority—really know about the systemic racism in the industry? Does the NBA All-Star and Hall of Famer realize he’s playing on the B squad? Perhaps he ought to team up with Byron Allen.

 

General Motors has a shiny new fleet of White advertising agencies. But in the end, it’s the same old story.

 

GM Adding New Roster Of Ad Agencies

 

By Rhian Hunt

 

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 bringing 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.”

 

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.

 

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.