Mazda Revving Up for Major Ad Drive to Gain on Leaders : * Marketing: The auto maker plans to pull out of ‘second tier’ by stressing ‘new’ corporate image as well as its new models. The massive TV and print campaign will begin Sunday.

Mazda Motor of America Inc. will unveil a massive new print and television ad campaign Sunday in its drive to pull out of the so-called second tier of car importers and make a place for itself among the leading Japanese car companies in the U.S. marketplace.

The multimillion-dollar campaign will hit Sunday with four ads stressing corporate identity. The ads will air hourly between 7 and 10 p.m. on each of the networks. The campaign will follow with television and print ads featuring Mazda’s new models, according to Janet Thompson, Mazda Motor of America’s vice president for marketing.

The double-barreled campaign promotes Mazda’s corporate image as well as its products. Corporate ads will tell consumers there is “a new Mazda” personified by the innovative Miata roadster introduced in 1990. Product ads will discuss all of Mazda’s lineup, ultimately revealing the five new models Mazda is set to introduce over the next nine months. The company says its rollout is the biggest single-year new model launch in U.S. automotive history.

All of Mazda’s cars and trucks, the ads say, “are just as pure and just as personal as the Miata.”

Mazda officials would not discuss the cost of the campaign, prepared by Foote, Cone & Belding/Orange County in Santa Ana, but said the company’s entire advertising budget for calendar 1991 remained unchanged from 1990, when the Irvine-based importer and distributor spent a reported $185 million.

A related three-year advertising deal with Time Warner Inc. is expected to cost Mazda as much as $96 million. As part of that package, which Thompson called the biggest ever assembled for a single advertiser, Mazda will buy huge chunks of advertising in 20 Time Warner magazines, sponsor three one-hour, Warner-produced “Hallmark Hall of Fame” television specials in the next year, and conduct a series of shopping mall and college campus tours to promote its vehicles.

Mazda will also give potential customers copies of a hard-cover, coffee-table picture book, “The Meaning of Life,” compiled by the editors of Life magazine and published in April. The book features the reflections of more than 100 people--famous and ordinary--on the meaning of life. Mazda, which promotes itself as a car company that designs and engineers its products with human beings in mind, will link itself to the book by using excerpts in its print campaigns, Thompson said.

The first of the new Mazda models to be introduced will be the redesigned 929 sedan, which has been transformed from a boxy, full-size family car into a softly rounded luxury sedan with leather seats, standard air bags for both the driver and the passenger, and an innovative solar-powered ventilation system.