Cadillac's Break Through
I don't know what has me on a kick about car commercials today, but this is another one that just rubs me the wrong way--specifically the CTS commercial with the background music of Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll. I guess you have to give GM credit for trying, but they still don't quite seem to have it. GM is not the same place that Harley Earl left--I'm sure Harley must have been keeping up a constant 4000 RPM in his grave ever since the Cimarron hit the market, and he probably has cranked it up a few notches after reviewing the CTS ad showing the '59 Caddy in the same frame with the CTS. I'm sure the intent is to draw from the legacy of the past of Cadillac and show the CTS as a worthy successor to the '59, and that the CTS is made for folks who are not on the way to the funeral home. However, the way it's done is just dumb looking. (As is the use of a similar Caddy in VoiceStream Wireless ads with Jamie Lee Curtis--there seem to be a few ad folks for whom a '59 Caddy embodies "America"--these people are not car people) The Caddy ads suffer from the same stupid decisionmaking process that GM seems to bumble through whenever it tries to mine its own past--witness the new Impala. For those of us who remember anything about the original, from back in the days when GM Styling was king, we know that the new version is nothing but a Biscayne. FOUR tailights is a BISCAYNE, SIX is an Impala! Feh!

But back to Cadillac--the past is all well and good, but the '59 is not that high of a standard--any of the various pre-1972 Eldorados would be the nearest equivalent in the minds of your target demographic--but the bigger problem is that anyone who really liked listening to Led Zeppelin is not going to like the Cadillac. Not only is the Harley Earl GM gone, but the Bunkie Knudsen GM is no more, too. Knudsen is reputed to have helped turned Pontiac's image around in the early Sixties by noting that "You can sell a young man's car to an old man, but you can never sell an old man's car to a young man." Sorry, but from a young man, Cadillac is still an old man's car. And Led Zeppelin ain't exactly the same as Bare Naked Ladies.

Hopefully, the arrival of Bob Lutz will shake some of the cobwebs loose in GM's structure and rid it of some of the worst aspects of the brand-management style of selling cars. Mr. Lutz, who, though old as the hills, is still a car guy and still understands that solid content is what it takes to sell cars when people are demanding solid content. Good luck to him.
posted by Terry at 4:58:00 PM