Part I

Director of Pontiac Marketing speaks on the Oprah-G6 marketing coup

Northwestern University-bred Director of Pontiac Marketing at General Motors Mark-Hans Richer talked to RBR/TVBR about their genius marketing effort with the new Pontiac G6, giving away 276 of them on Oprah recently (9/14 TVBR Daily Epaper #179).

CLICK HERE for the video of the giveaway.

What is the marketing strategy that included this latest effort with Oprah?

It may not yet be imminently obvious, although hopefully now it is: Pontiac has been trying to do a bit of a different model here in the last year or so. And it's not to say that we'll never stop doing TV ads and things like that, but the idea that you would sort of fuse the product message with an entertainment message, in a way that enhances both, is something that we've been trying to do for a while. So Oprah is really a good example of it from the standpoint of our cars basically became the content of the show, and the reason why the show was so engaging and earned such a high rating.

It was a win-win for everybody, and everybody's brother...

And if you think about what we did earlier this year, a movie called "The Last Ride," which was a production for the GTO launch with the USA Network starring Dennis Hopper. We basically made an original two-hour film with USA Network and Universal Productions all written around the GTO, both past and current. So this idea that we need to do less traditional things...everybody has been saying that but not everybody has been doing it. And further, I don't think they really know what they mean by doing it. When it comes to the modern media environment, for us, it's taking our products and making them not only the center of the story, but the thing that makes the story interesting, worthwhile watching or taking about. Hat's what we mean by, sort of, "product fusion." So it's not just product placement. Placement just means just stick a car in a frame and watch it drive by. That's different. We would never, ever spend $10M just to have a car driving down the road in a major motion picture. We would much rather spend that same amount of money producing our own film with top creative talent. As a matter of fact, "The Last Drive" was executive produced by Rob Cohen, who was the director of "The Fast and Furious."

So that's what we're trying to do. It's not easy to do, and it's not to say that we don't do other things as well, traditional things, like our NCAA platform has been very strong for us, or we're on Survivor starting [last] night. We've got the only product placement on Survivor for automotive this season.

How receptive are the networks and production companies in sitting down and working out a major "product fusion" or product placement deal like this?

Well, they're not always that receptive to tell you the truth. But they're always interested. They just don't always know how it's going to work, because maybe they've never done this before. But once they get used to doing it, it becomes kind of old hat. There are a lot of different models being pursued right now and so obviously you can imagine the people are kind of getting used to things they haven't always done. There's always an adjustment period.

Monday: How the Oprah G6 giveaway was "hatched."