Geo Campaign Takes On a Split Personality

Suppose you saw a car commercial that repeated five times--in one minute--that the model was an import. Then imagine if that same advertisement hardly mentioned who was selling it. What car maker, with its headlights on straight, would run such an ad?

Toyota? Nope. Nissan? No way. Volkswagen? Not even close. How about--Chevrolet?

Early next month, television viewers living on the West Coast will see ads for a new line of cars called Geo to be sold by Chevrolet. The Geo is General Motors’ new unifying nameplate for the firm’s imports--including a redesigned Chevy Sprint to be called the Metro and a replacement for the Chevy Nova to be called Prizm.

The ads feature science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison making a sales pitch in what looks like a natural history museum, and he repeatedly states that the cars are imported from Japan. But these same ads, created by the Los Angeles advertising firm Vic Olesen & Partners, barely allude to the fact that Chevrolet sells the cars.

At the same time, the rest of the country will see entirely different ads that don’t even state that the cars are made overseas. Instead, these commercials, created by the Warren, Mich., ad firm Lintas: Campbell Ewald, are flashy, MTV-look-alike ads that mostly hype how much fun the vehicles are to drive.

This disparity might sound rather odd. After all, it isn’t often that two totally different advertising strategies for the same car run concurrently in different parts of the country. Oh sure, individual groups of car dealers from different states have long-created ads that run in specific regions of the country. But these campaigns are relatively small scale, and they rarely contradict the theme line of parent company’s advertising.

In this case, however, Chevrolet is asking two major ad agencies to create two separate--if not contradictory--campaigns for the same product. Advertising executives say this strategy will be closely watched this year in the automobile industry.

“The other auto makers are all watching this like hawks,” said Harry Wright Chapman, president of Wright Edge, an auto advertising consulting firm in Albuquerque, N.M. “They’re all waiting for this strategy to be proven so that they can go ahead and jump in the water.”

Not that there aren’t some dangers in trying to get across two totally different messages at once. “It’s a very controversial issue,” said Jim Hillson, an auto analyst at the Los Angeles advertising research firm Phase One. “On the West Coast, they’re trying to reach consumers who won’t even walk onto the lots of domestic auto dealers,” he said. “But there’s an incongruity there, when the rest of the country is hearing about how much fun the cars are to drive. These two messages, at the very least, can be confusing.”

Well, Vic Olesen doesn’t think so. But Olesen concedes that it took “plenty of arm twisting” to get Chevrolet to adopt a West Coast ad strategy that differed so radically from that seen by the rest of the country.

His argument: About half the cars purchased on the West Coast are imports. “If you’re going to appeal to that half of the market, you’d better say something that interests them,” said Olesen. Indeed, Olesen told Chevrolet that on the West Coast, the company must distance the name Geo as far from Chevrolet as possible. “You can imagine,” said Olesen, “how this went over in Detroit at first.”

But Chevrolet consented. Olesen convinced Chevy officials to try to zero in on the import car buyer on the West Coast. That customer is generally best persuaded by logical information, not emotional appeal, said Olesen. So the agency hired author Harlan Ellison as the West Coast pitchman for Geo. In an interview, Ellison--who is regarded as a staunch ecologist and environmentalist--said he agreed to do the advertisement only after reading that the Geo models rank tops in mileage among all cars sold in the U.S. “Appealing to the intellect,” said Ellison, “seemed like a unique way to get someone’s attention. It’s a lot better than most car ads that essentially say, ‘This car will be your mistress.’ ”

Indeed, Chevrolet executives, who are desperately trying to grapple with import competition on the West Coast, are willing to try just about anything. “Perhaps it will seem confusing to some people,” said Ron Daniels, Chevrolet’s Western area marketing manager. “But the car can fit both images.”

Competitors have their doubts. ‘It’s not as if people who live in California live on a different planet,” said John Vanderzee, ad manager for Ford. “We don’t think that, creatively, we have to talk to them in a different form than people who live in another state.”

Meanwhile, the Buick division of General Motors doesn’t make any special ads for California. But it tosses out any possible national ad campaigns that don’t test exceptionally well in California, said Jay Qualman, Buick’s advertising director, In fact, Buick’s current ad campaign, “the Road Belongs to Buick,” was basically used last year because it appealed so well in test groups of California consumers. This, despite the fact that three other ad campaigns were even more popular among consumer groups tested in the rest of the country.

Folks in the Midwest, for example, especially liked the slogan, “Buick, and proud of it.” But Californians didn’t, so it was never used, said Qualman. What’s more, a campaign with the slogan, “Buick, right where you belong,” proved very popular in almost every area of the country. But in these focus group interviews, California residents complained that the slogan didn’t say enough about the car, said Qualman. So it, too, was never used.

“We figure that if it works in California,” said Qualman, “it will work anywhere.”

Woman Behind Flower Ad Rises at Agency

“Somewhere in this world, there’s a woman with pictures of you naked,” read the copy to the print ad. “Be nice to her.”

The woman the ad refers to, of course, is Mom. And this ad, created for Conroy’s Florists, raised lots of eyebrows when it ran last Mother’s Day. Now, the woman who created the campaign has been named second-in-command at a major Los Angeles ad firm.

Late last week, Brandon (Brandy) French was named executive vice president and creative director of the Los Angeles office of the Salt Lake City ad firm Evans Communications. Prior to that, she spent three years at the Los Angeles office of the ad agency J. Walter Thompson. There, she oversaw much of the advertising copy that the office produced.

French, 40, has paid her dues. Right out of UCLA, she worked briefly as a waitress at the former Pink Pussycat lounge in Hollywood and then moved to New York, where she worked for several New York agencies. Then, after receiving a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley, she was hired as an assistant professor of English at Yale. She left five years later, and worked in the television industry as a director of development at Columbia Pictures Television. In 1982, she was named West Coast director of program development for the Cable Health Network.

At Evans, French will oversee new advertising efforts for clients such as the Beverly Hills Hotel and the agency’s newest piece of business--Hamburger Hamlet. “Their next campaign,” she said, “will talk more about the Hamlet and less about the hamburgers.”

Castellanos Family Keeps Grip on Growth

After picking up $1.8 million in new business over the past six months, Castellanos Latina is one of the fastest-growing Latino ad shops in Los Angeles.

And much of that new business will stay right in the family. That’s because the 2-year-old agency is run by three members of the Castellanos family. “It can sometimes be an Olympic task to separate business from family,” said Julio Castellanos Jr., vice president of the firm. “We all know each other backward and forward, so there’s really nothing we can hide.”

He works with his father, Julio Sr., who is president of the firm, and Julio Sr.’s wife, Vania, who is senior vice president and creative director. Over the past six months, the agency has picked up the Latino advertising accounts from the Broadway, Certified Grocers of California, American Cancer Society and the warehouse retail chain Smart & Final.

In just two years, the firm has grown from a three-person shop to a 12-person agency. And employees come from nine Latino nationalities. Said Julio Sr.: “That’s what the Hispanic market is all about.”