Chevrolet Malibu Day Is Today – Online
October 17, 2007

By Dale Buss

Today, on the Internet, Chevrolet begins to find out whether its hugely ambitious strategy for the new Malibu sedan is getting some traction. General Motors’ top sales division planned what it not so modestly is calling a “takeover” of online advertising in what really may be the most ambitious such effort yet by any major marketer.

“This will be the largest home-page takeover ever,” crowed Bill Ludwig, vice chairman and chief creative officer of Campbell-Ewald, Chevy’s longtime advertising agency.

The idea is to make the completely new vehicle unavoidable online and lend some early credibility to Chevy’s marketing theme for the 2008 Malibu: “The Car You Can’t Ignore.”

Basically, Chevrolet bid to paper many of the Internet’s most popular home pages today with images of the sleek, new midsize car and an unusually deep well of immediately accessible accompanying information.

Malibu is dominating the home pages of Yahoo.com, Edmunds.com, MSN.com, AOL.com, the New York Times, MTV, Facebook and a long list of other general, sports, lifestyle and automotive Web sites today -– even including AllRecipes.com, Oprah.com, MarieClaire.com and ESPN.com.

Chevy isn’t saying how much the one-day Internet-ad blowout will cost.

“In the past, advertisers have taken over maybe one major home page, like Yahoo.com,” said Mike Cassidy, CEO and founder of Undertone Networks, a digital-marketing agency in New York. “But this is going way beyond. It’s showing that the Web can be used for a huge promotion.”

Overall, Chevrolet has mapped out a tall mountain to climb with its introduction of the all-new Malibu sedan to dealer showrooms November 1: competing with Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, the long-time kings of the hill in the midsize automobile segment, as well as the more dynamically styled Nissan Altima.

The first obstacle is getting non-Chevy buyers to consider Malibu as a serious alternative to the Japanese-designed leaders, whose quality levels, utilitarian value and familiarity to consumers make them formidable occupants of the drivers’ seats in the huge midsize segment.

Chevy’s old Malibu barely made a dent in the category. And in the meantime, Chevy devoted most of its marketing resources to boosting sales of its pickup trucks and SUVs, high-margin entries that have been facing fuel-price headwinds lately.

“We are the underdogs; we recognize that,” said Kim Kosak, general director of Chevrolet advertising and sales promotion. “We have an unprecedented challenge. We have to make a completely fresh start. We have to give [consumers] a reason to get out of the cars they’re in now.” She added: “We need to shock the system and get their attention.”

The vehicle itself will do much of that work. The new Malibu unquestionably is competitively styled, a sleek machine whose lines are variously reminiscent of the three category leaders it is chasing -- and a decided departure from the outdated, blunt-tailed silhouette of the old car. Loaded with features, the idea is for the 2008 Malibu to come off like a $40,000 car even though it’ll be available in a full-featured version for around $20,000. And a hybrid will be included in Malibu’s lineup from the start.

“There’s a huge perceptual gap we have to overcome,” Ludwig explained. “Our goal really is to position Malibu as a car that anyone would be proud to own rather than one they want to hide in their garage.”

Added Ludwig: “So we’ll act like Lexus but only in an invitational way… Our tone will be: [the Toyota] Yaris meets Lexus. This car is going to be elegant but fun.”

Another key for Chevrolet is to target four demographic groups who, to varying degrees, have demonstrated little allegiance to the brand or, specifically, to Malibu over the years. They include childless singles and couples in their 30s or 40s; ethnically diverse, upscale suburban professionals; young, hip singles who’ve recently settled in metro neighborhoods and share a “progressive sensibility”; and middle- and working-class, child-filled households who rank high for owning three or more vehicles.

Chevy’s overall strategy for reaching members of these four cohorts covers a wide range of initiatives, from oversize billboards in unavoidable locations in key cities such as Times Square in New York, to a major print-marketing initiative with Conde Nast publications, to a particular focus on Hispanic and African-American consumers. The traditional advertising strategy begins this week with a focus on TV ads on Major League Baseball’s league championships and World Series.

But Kosak said that Chevy’s internet-advertising strategy, beginning with Wednesday’s blitz, is a linchpin. “Online is the [key to] the commonality among the four demographic groups,” she said.

Chevy marketers maintain that blanketing the most popular general, lifestyle and auto-related home pages with Malibu stuff is a surefire way to get past consumers’ generally anemic interest in investigating pop-up advertising online.

“The click-through rate for consumers is about .001 percent,” conceded Ludwig, whose venerable agency is based across the road from Chevy divisional headquarters in Warren, Michigan. “But the average consumer returns to their home page eight times a day.”

Malibu’s online targets, Ludwig said, are “very practical in their Internet usage. They’re not just playing online; they’re learning.”

Images of the car will automatically come forward and fill the home-page parameters on the selected sites. Consumers will have the option of immediately closing the banner image or, “after a beat,” as Ludwig put it, the car will shrink back.

Those who want to learn about the 2008 Malibu will have a handful of options: to take a 360-degree virtual tour of the vehicle, to see a comparison against the big Japanese competitors, to read some third-party endorsements, or even to look at colors. And all of that is even before a consumer is given the option of going to the Malibu Web site per se.

“We’re going to bring the shopping experience right to the Web site,” Ludwig said. “We want them to experience the car in and out, right there.”

Given that gambits on this scale are unprecedented or at least rare, Chevy and Campbell-Ewald faced some obstacles. One of them was that, given the size and importance of the Web sites they targeted, the Malibu team had to work within the portals’ logistical and technical parameters rather than the other way around.

“The home pages are site-served by the portals themselves, so we couldn’t have Double Click or some other third party do that for us,” said Sandy Schadler, senior vice president and digital strategist for Campbell-Ewald. “That means file sizes are different and even tracking is different for each site.”

Chevrolet, of course, is planning to follow up via e-mail with consumers who pursue the Internet feelers to get more information. Another digital venue is working with bloggers on automotive sites -– including GM’s own blog, FastLane, manned mainly by Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. So, Wednesday’s extravaganza represents only the beginning, not the climax, of its online strategy for marketing the new Malibu.

In fact, Chevrolet already is indicating that it is planning another “online takeover”: for November 17, the day that it also stages a big TV-advertising effort connected with the Country Music Awards show.

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