Cadillac Turns To A 28-Year-Old To Reinvent The “Standard Of The World”
Caddy turns to a 28-year old to reinvent its brand
Excerpt:
The woman in my passenger seat says to kill the engine and restart it. I do, igniting a deep humming gurgle that crescendos, enveloping us in the reverberating neigh of 556 supercharged horses. The dials go green. The needles flutter past the redline. My audio-somatosensory experience has been fine-tuned to elicit maximum dopamine release, to provide an experience so radically unique that I might see an ancient thing in a modern light—even something as fossilized as the 110-year-old “Standard of the World,” that old floaty boat, the Cadillac.
Partalo began by scrapping the old approach of mini-campaigns for each model. “Sometimes you want to communicate to each buyer based on his individual needs,” she says, her pumpkin-colored hair falling in waves around the Recaro bucket seat, a hand-stitched blend of black leather and saffron faux suede. “But the luxury buyer is different. He’s more concerned with the brand’s overall background, its heritage.” If you’re still claiming Standard of the World status, you better be able to prove it—especially when you’re putting $70,000 of American metal up against Germany’s finest. “So we wanted to do two things,” she says. “First, bring Caddy back to its original standing. Second, do it through a campaign of substance.”
By “substance,” she means quantifiable evidence of craftsmanship. True, Fallon’s ads lay it on thick—talk of “red-blooded luxury” and “derivative of nothing”—but it knows buyers won’t care that Alicia Keys, Justin Bieber, Jewel, and Gisele all love their Caddies. They care that the Black Diamond Edition of the CTS-V Coupe, the car we’re in now, destroyed the BMW M5 at Germany’s Nurburgring racetrack. They’re titillated to find German engineering being called into question. They care about details. They care about Recaro.
Another excerpt:
What makes car owners different? They dress and tip the same. It’s in how they react when the valet scratches their car. I heard consistent stories: Lexus owners don’t say anything and immediately call the police and insurance company. BMW owners scream at him—‘I’ll have your job!’ That sort of thing. But Cadillac owners pat him on the back, say, ‘It’s gonna be all right, kid; we’ll figure it out,’ and then tip him anyway and drive off.”
True or not, it’s a good line—nourishing, if you own the car. A pre-Fallon, 2007 Caddy campaign showed Grey’s Anatomy star Kate Walsh zipping down a tunnel, asking, “When you turn your car on, does it return the favor?” Partalo’s ads, with their techy specifics, don’t tease a buyer. They flatter a driver.
Conceptually, then, what does it take to drive a new Caddy? Well, listen: It comes off like this. It’s not about youth or some conformist’s emblem of success. For you, success is a moving target. You don’t buy a Cadillac because you’ve made it. You buy because you’remaking it. Let Johnny Law School be safe in the Benz; Billy Banker harmless in his Beamer. But not you. You don’t default to the South of France. You climb the Seven Peaks. You don’t fritter life away in a job you hate, hoping the pension pays out just in time to croak. You take a chance. Do something about it.
Great article about story telling.
^^ Truth. This kind of advertising I like. The less-manipulative kind.
But let me get this straight.
I have been noticing lately that Caddies have been looking pretty cool, and their ads have jumped up a notch.
And you’re telling me the reason these ads have jumped up a notch is a really smart, really cute Bosnian refugee who grew up in Minneapolis and went to the University of Minnesota?
Well, goddamn.
Relevant to very nearly all of my interests. Give her a guitar and we’re all set over here.
