Screen Magazine: Vol. 28, Issue 22

Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 28, Issue 22 - Index

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Chevrolet is coming out, guns blazing, this
fall with an all-out assault on the mid-size
car segment. The targets? Camry, Accord
and the people who buy them. With the
launch of the all-new Malibu, Chevy aims to
prove that not only can its model compete
with the imports, but that it is indeed, “The
Car You Can’t Ignore.”
The Malibu launch (led by Warren, Mich.based
Campbell-Ewald) will take place in
three phases – disrupt, reveal and enroll – in
an attempt to get the attention of a consumer
base that is skeptical of domestic mid-size
sedans.
“The goal is to shock the system,” says Kim
Kosak, general director, Chevrolet advertising
and sales promotion. “What you’re going to see
in the creative is an intense, unavoidable burst
of activity to open their minds that Chevrolet
is a viable competitor in the marketplace.”
One of the lynchpins of this launch is cracking
the nut that is mid-size sedan buyers. “Midcar
people are a lot harder to get under their
surface and understand them,” says Kosak.
“We have shifted our target deliberately to
go after the mindset of the import loyal and
import neutral. They’re a deeply entrenched
target [and] we’ve got to give them a reason to
get out of the cars they’re in right now…we’ve
got to disrupt the market.”
The market disruption, which began Oct.
17, includes unprecedented digital dominance,
which, says Kosak, is “the biggest digital
presence ever in marketing.”
At press time, the homepage takeover was
estimated to generate around 800 million
impressions and drive 5 million hits to Chevy.
com. On that day, users of homepages such as
Yahoo! will have had their regular homepage
taken over by several different versions of the
Malibu nanosite.
The “reveal” phase will roll out at the
Country Music Awards in November, and
the “enroll” phase will happen in the first
quarter of 2008. By then, the hope is that
the consumer’s attention will be on Malibu.
But not without first getting over a pretty
substantial obstacle.
“We have a huge perceptual gap from
the perception of the ability of a domestic
manufacturer to build a mid-size car that
can compete, to the reality of the product,”
says Bill Ludwig, vice chairman, CCO at
Campbell-Ewald. “So we have a huge task
in front of us. Our goal is to position
Malibu as a car that anyone would be
proud to own.”
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