Chevrolet Malibu Again Takes Over Online
November 07, 2007
Today’s the day designated for a second “takeover” of online advertising by the 2008 Chevrolet Malibu –- although this invasion will take a few days, unlike the car’s one-day blitzkrieg on October 17.
Having pronounced its earlier takeover a blazing success, Wednesday Chevrolet also planned to make it nearly impossible for Internet surfers to ignore its new midsize sedan. Chevy bought advertisements that occupy many of the highest-traffic home pages ranging from Yahoo.com to Amazon.com to FoodNetwork.com. Connected to the online effort is a big advertising push for Malibu on and around the Country Music Awards telecast tonight on ABC.
Mark LaNeve proclaimed the results “awesome” from October 17. Specifically, GM’s North America vice president of vehicle sales, service and marketing said in an interview Tuesday with AutoObserver that he was pleased both with the online traffic generated by Malibu’s ad swarm and by the amount of time that visitors spent with Malibu content.
“The goal of the first phase was to ‘disrupt,’ while the goal of the next phase will be to ‘reveal’ and debunk skepticism by taking a more methodical approach to build credibility with consumers through the use of third-party endorsements,” said GM spokeswoman Ryndee Carney.
Specifically, on October 17, Chevy said that nearly nine out of 10 Internet users saw Malibu messages; the 
company’s target was eight out of 10. More than 960 million impressions were delivered; the internal goal was 800 million. More than 3.7 million unique visitors interacted with Malibu content. The campaign drove record traffic to Chevy.com –- more than three times the previous daily high traffic; the company declined to reveal specific traffic levels for competitive reasons.
GM said that there were more than 317,000 of what it called “success events,” in which someone clicked to a specific Web page from a Malibu ad. In this case, it was a click to locate a dealer page, request a price-quote page, a “build-your-own” Malibu page, or others.
“These are very ‘lower-funnel’ measures that indicate a customer is rather serious about considering the car for purchase,” said Carney.
Christopher Barger, GM’s director of global communications technology and manager of its FastLane blog, agreed that the Malibu ads “were as comprehensive as they could get” on October 17, including TV and print as well as online. “They were in the air that day. Every newspaper I checked, every time I was on WiFi at the airport, every time I turned around there was something about the Malibu. And it looked like some of the auto blogs were picking up the commercials and video clips.”
GM declined to be more specific about its purpose or plans for the phased-in “takeover” that began Wednesday or why Chevrolet selected November 17 specifically, except to say that the CMA Awards are an important cog in Malibu’s overall marketing.
Posted by Michelle Krebs at 7:13 AM under GM , News , Technology | Comments (1) | digg this | Seed Newsvine
What GM is doing is working. Their marketing efforts will equal sales because their product has gotten so good.
Posted by: Ames Tiedeman | January 01, 2008 at 7:17 PM