Chrysler Will Relaunch Its Eagle Division : Advertising: A $100-million multimedia campaign will try to raise awareness among buyers.

Chrysler Corp. said Thursday it will spend more than $100 million on a multimedia advertising campaign aimed at relaunching its fledgling Eagle division.

The campaign, which begins this week with a spot on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” is geared toward raising the profile of Chrysler’s smallest and most troubled division, particularly with young import buyers.

“Our problem is awareness,” Ed Brust, general manager of Chrysler’s Jeep Eagle Division, told reporters.

“We’re getting the right people; we’re just not getting enough volume of these people,” Brust said.

Indeed, since the start of the year, Eagle sales are off 27%, though the rest of the U.S. auto industry is up almost 10%.

The decline has sparked widespread speculation that Chrysler might dump the Eagle brand and allow its 2,250 Jeep/Eagle dealers to sell just Jeeps.

But Brust said Chrysler intends to keep Eagle, and he said the company is tripling its annual advertising budget for the 1995 model year to attract more customers.

“We need to make it easier to find and buy an Eagle,” Brust said. “A good deal on a product that no one knows about is no deal at all.”

Over the next few months, Eagle plans to roll out 18 different TV commercials to air during popular programs such as “Seinfeld,” “Melrose Place,” “Star Trek” and nationally televised football and basketball games.

The campaign, which was crafted by Bozell North in Southfield, Mich., features Greg Kinnear, the host of NBC’s “Later” program and E! Entertainment network’s “Talk Soup” show.

Brust said the first few commercials will focus on the new Eagle Talon, but later spots will promote the Eagle Vision mid-size sedan and Eagle’s trio of Summit models. Brust said both brands have failed to live up to Chrysler’s expectations, in large part because the auto maker has not done a good enough job advertising them.

“As I told our dealers last night, we have not begun to see the true sales potential for the Vision,” Brust said.

Brust said the previous Vision commercials, which featured the tag line “Not for the general public” were “a little soft,” and did little to broaden Eagle’s appeal.

Brust promised that the new campaign, which also features more than 25 million magazine inserts, will be more focused and include a toll-free telephone number prospective buyers can call to arrange test drives.

He said the auto maker hopes to sell as many as 100,000 Eagle cars in the 1995 model year, up from an estimated 60,000 this year. Some of the increase will come from higher volume across the industry, but Brust said Eagle also helps to increase its share of the market from its current level of 0.4%.