General Motors is swapping football for football. The automaker has signed a 5-year sponsorship deal with Manchester United. The move -a part of the global strategy for its Chevrolet badge – follows the company’s decision to stop advertising in the Super Bowl.
Manchester United, the 19-time English champion football team, has a worldwide reach that fits with the automaker’s desire to make Chevrolet a global icon, Paul Edwards, GM executive director of global marketing strategy, said in an interview prior to the announcement.
“It’s clear that global football presented us with a significant opportunity to spread Chevrolet around the world,” he said. “We recognized that it’s not only the world’s biggest sport but also the world’s most engaged fans.”
The agreement follows GM’s decision this month to halt paid advertising on Facebook and forgo next year’s Super Bowl championship game of the National Football League in the U.S. The decision to sponsor Manchester United isn’t related to GM’s move to stop Super Bowl advertising, Edwards said. Still, the numbers are compelling.
When Manchester United played against Manchester City, “that audience around the world scaled to 600 million people,” Edwards said. “Compare that to the Super Bowl here in the States, which is roughly 110, 115 million, and you’re talking five times that audience watching one regular-season game. It’s significant.”
The moves are among the first steps of chief marketing officer Joel Ewanick’s efforts to revamp Chevrolet’s marketing with a new global agency and save $2 billion over five years.
CEO Dan Akerson wants to make Chevrolet and Cadillac into global brands that are less dependent on the U.S. market. While Chevy is known in the U.S. for its brawny trucks and Corvette sports car, many Chevrolets sold in Asia and Europe are smaller vehicles designed and engineered in South Korea.
That’s why GM is working to craft a more global message for the brand that can be tailored for many markets, said Alan Baum, principal of auto-industry forecaster Baum & Associates in West Bloomfield, Michigan. “Now that they feel reasonably comfortable about the product, how can we leverage that?” he said, describing the company’s thinking. “It’s going to take a little bit of time and look a little messy.”
Sponsoring Manchester United emerged from Ewanick’s decision to shift all Chevrolet advertising to a newly formed agency called Commonwealth, Edwards said. That firm, a joint venture between Omnicom Group Inc.’s Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Interpublic Group of Cos.’s McCann Erickson, replaces 70 agencies that had worked on the Chevrolet business, the company has said.
Ewanick’s aim is to focus on effective spending. More than 20 TV ads, he said, were created to promote the Chevrolet Cruze compact car around the world, when only a half-dozen were really needed.
“Every penny matters,” Ewanick said in an interview earlier this year. “It may seem like a little thing you do in Thailand. But if you take that little thing in Thailand, a little thing in Brazil, a little thing in Germany and France and you add it up, it becomes a big thing.”
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