Wally Edgar Chevrolet - N.Y. Times Gets A Sit Down With GM's Joel Ewanick

Aug. 6, 2010 - PRLog -- A Whirlwind Moves Into G.M.’s Marketing Office

By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: August 5, 2010

NEVER mind the globe-trotting roué whom Dos Equis beer describes as “the most interesting man in the world.” On Madison Avenue, at least, that sobriquet belongs these days to Joel Ewanick.

General Motors is the third automaker for which Joel Ewanick has held a marketing job this year.
Mr. Ewanick is in a bright industry spotlight for his new job as vice president for United States marketing at General Motors, overseeing a huge advertising budget that totaled $2.2 billion last year. But attention is being paid to him for other reasons, too.

G.M. is the third automaker for which Mr. Ewanick has held a marketing job this year. He began 2010 at Hyundai Motor America in Fountain Valley, Calif., where he was vice president for marketing, lauded for successful innovations like a guarantee plan sold under the name Hyundai Assurance.

In March, Mr. Ewanick left Hyundai for Nissan Motor America in Nashville, becoming vice president for marketing. Only two months later, he left Nissan to join General Motors in Detroit.

“ ‘Dude, you have to do this,’ ” Mr. Ewanick recalled Mark Reuss, the G.M. president for North America, saying in a phone call that happened while house-hunting in Nashville.

“It was one of those moments,” Mr. Ewanick said. “In 60 seconds, I said I wanted to do it.”

Since arriving at G.M., Mr. Ewanick, who turned 50 in June, has been making changes faster than a Corvette races down a highway. In his first weeks, he dismissed the creative agencies for Cadillac and Chevrolet — two of G.M.’s remaining four brands — and moved their assignments to agencies with which he had previously worked.

More recently, Mr. Ewanick has hired additional new agencies, for tasks like social media and marketing to Hispanic consumers; begun seeking ideas for sponsored programming in the vein of venerable series like the “Dinah Shore Chevy Show”; disclosed that G.M. would return as a Super Bowl advertiser in 2011 after skipping the games this year and last; formed what he calls an advisory “marketing board of directors,” composed of the top executives of the major G.M. agencies; and approved a decision to proclaim Cadillac as “The new standard of the world” in a coming campaign.

Oh, yes, and Mr. Ewanick is also trying to figure out how General Motors — only recently emerged from bankruptcy — ought to market its cars, trucks, crossovers and other vehicles during perhaps the most challenging economy since the Depression.

“It’s like everything I’ve done in my career led to this,” Mr. Ewanick said during a wide-ranging, 60-minute interview in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday.

And it is “something worth changing your life for,” he added, because helping G.M. recover is “a noble cause” — although maybe not “God’s work,” he agreed with a grin when that term, notoriously used by Goldman Sachs, was suggested to him.

When Mr. Ewanick took the job at Nissan, he said, he received 300 e-mail messages, but “the day it came out” that he was leaving for General Motors “I had four, five thousand e-mails,” he added, “from people I did not know,” and soon received dozens of documents, running “seven, eight pages, saying, ‘For what it’s worth, here are some ideas.’ ”

“The pent-up passion, enthusiasm, people have for these brands is huge, and it runs really deep,” Mr. Ewanick said. “We need to find a way to channel, to use, that.”

But, he acknowledged, for “the last 30 or 40 years, consumers became so secondary” for G.M. that “they weren’t brought into what we were doing.”

“I believe strongly in ‘consumer first,’ ” Mr. Ewanick said, and that will be demonstrated in the company’s new campaigns.

The creative agencies for Cadillac and Chevrolet were abruptly changed, he added, because “I need partners on these two critical brands that understand how to tell a story.”

In May, Mr. Ewanick moved the Chevrolet account to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group, from offices of Publicis Worldwide, part of the Publicis Groupe. The shift came only a month after the Chevrolet creative assignment had been consolidated at Publicis.

Mr. Ewanick had worked with Goodby, Silverstein at Hyundai and also when he was the chief marketer at Porsche Cars North America. He said, however, that he had not arrived at G.M. intending to hire his former ad partners, but rather made a change because “we didn’t think” Publicis “would be a workable solution” for Chevrolet’s needs.

“It was unfortunate people got hurt,” Mr. Ewanick said, referring to complaints from Publicis executives about being blindsided by the switch. “Mea culpa. We didn’t do it right.”
As for similar protests last month from the New York office of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which lost the Cadillac account after a six-month stint, those have been addressed, he added, and the handoff to the new agency “has been almost flawless.”

Mr. Ewanick hired Fallon Worldwide in Minneapolis, another Publicis Groupe agency, to take over the Cadillac work; he had worked with Fallon, too, when he was at Porsche. That change came after a determination that Bartle Bogle would “not be able to get us to where we need to be for the long haul,” Mr. Ewanick said, whereas Fallon, and particularly its chairman emeritus, Pat Fallon, “know luxury brands and how to operate in the auto industry with its quirks.”

The new theme for Cadillac from Fallon, which echoes the longtime slogan, “Standard of the world,” will express the brand’s promise of “red-blooded extraordinary” performance, Mr. Ewanick said, and “red-blooded luxury.”

It cannot be said that Mr. Ewanick is not a quick study. He joked that in hiring two additional agencies — Big Fuel in New York, for social media efforts, and LatinWorks in Austin, Tex., part of Omnicom, for ads for Chevrolet aimed at Hispanics — there would be no outcries like there were the last two times.

Mr. Ewanick said he was similarly cautious when discussions at General Motors turned to competitive matters he might have learned about at Nissan or Hyundai.

“I literally have to be very aware of certain things and be very careful about sharing things I know,” he added. “A number of times, I’ve had to walk out of meetings and say, ‘Excuse me.’ ”

Some knowledge, though, is hard to hide. Asked if G.M. might resume advertising during the Academy Awards in addition to the Super Bowl, Mr. Ewanick’s smile suggested that the deal he made at Hyundai to be the exclusive automotive sponsor of the Oscars for 2010 seems to run through at least 2011.
Photo by:
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

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