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 marketing efforts, including the new Pontiac G6, giving away 276 of them on Oprah recently (9/14 TVBR Daily Epaper #179). Continued from Monday.

Does the G6 campaign focus on women? What other media are you looking at?

Well, the target for the G6 is 50/50 male, female. Which sounds like kind of a lazy objective, but it's true. And if you look at the pillars of our marketing, at least right now, you've got (beyond the normal sort of frequency-building stuff we do) Oprah, the NCAA, covering men) and then you've got Survivor kind of sitting in the middle hitting it 50/50. Beyond that, you start growing smaller efforts around those pillars. And for the women, we've also got a fairly decent investment with Lifetime network. We're doing some unique marketing there, as well as even Modern Brides Magazine.

And on the male side of the equation, obviously we have all of our sports, all of our male publications, and the web because there are more men swimming around the banners and websites. So there are different things going on for the different audiences, but I'm selling the G6 to all of them, with the same general idea but in different media.

It's amazing the charitable angle you got out of the media reporting on the Oprah giveaway. All the people in her audience had been picked because they had written in needing a car. The media really reported this in a positive light.

That was very strong part of it and really very moving, I have to say.

I noticed the teaser campaign you did on TV around the Olympics. Just a piece of a car flying by, the G6 mention and a URL...I didn't even know it was a Pontiac.

It was intentionally not saying anything about Pontiac. That was a very successful play for us too. All of these investments are sort of stacked into each other as part of an overall sort of spectrum of advertising and marketing promotion that changes along the way because you're hitting the market at different points. So when the Olympics advertising started, we had absolutely no brand awareness. But we also didn't really want pure brand awareness, we wanted intrigue. And we wanted to satisfy the intrigue by our website, which we had a lot of data on that says people leave with a much higher impression of Pontiac once they go to Pontiac.com. But we have a hard time getting them there if they're not naturally a fan of Pontiac.com. So getting them there improves their opinion right by that, but the intrigue was the real goal.

And for Oprah, before we start the main advertising, I think if you have asked the average person on the street, "What's a G6?" They could have as easily answered, "Well it's a new computer" or "It's an economic conference in Geneva."

But now I think we've solved that. The awareness there, but it's something I think we're going to keep chasing for a while. But there will be another stage that follows this that will sort of fill in the story and it's all going to be fun.

So you're going to ride this wave for a while...

Well, you know naturally we will and then I think it kind of has to be itself. If you try to milk it too much it might turn on you. If you're looking too opportunist...I don't really want to do that. I think this was a very good opportunity for Oprah, and a good opportunity for us and it was a great opportunity for her audience. And because of that, we'd just like to let it be natural. But then, obviously, we'll take advantage of it in some ways, but probably not in direct ways.

Is this campaign for the G6, because it's so unique so far, is it costing less than traditional new car launches?

If this was a car that had already been out for two years, I probably would not have chosen to do the Oprah thing, because there probably wouldn't have been as much news in it for us. To have people know we gave away a bunch of cars but to not have the upside value of "well what is that car" and the discovery that comes from that, wouldn't be as worth it for us. So the timing and importance of the car was actually crucial for this idea to sort of work.

But overall, the amount of money we're spending on this is about what you'd probably expect for a major new car launch from any manufacturer. We're just doing it in different ways.

CLICK HERE for the video of the giveaway.