Never mind the globe-trotting roué whom Dos Equis beer describes as “the most interesting man in the world.” On Madison Avenue, at least, that sobriquet belongs these days to Joel Ewanick.
Ewanick is in a bright industry spotlight for his new job as vice president for US marketing at General Motors, overseeing a huge advertising budget that totaled $2.2 billion last year. But attention is being paid to him for other reasons, too.
G.M. is the third automaker for which Ewanick has held a marketing job this year. He began 2010 at Hyundai Motor America in Fountain Valley, Calif., where he was vice president for marketing, lauded for successful innovations like a guarantee plan sold under the name Hyundai Assurance.
Since arriving at G.M., Ewanick, who turned 50 in June, has been making changes faster than a Corvette races down a highway. In his first weeks, he dismissed the creative agencies for Cadillac and Chevrolet — two of G.M.’s remaining four brands — and moved their assignments to agencies with which he had previously worked.
More recently, Ewanick has hired additional new agencies, for tasks like social media and marketing to Hispanic consumers; begun seeking ideas for sponsored programming in the vein of venerable series like the “Dinah Shore Chevy Show”; disclosed that G.M. would return as a Super Bowl advertiser in 2011 after skipping the games this year and last; formed what he calls an advisory “marketing board of directors,” composed of the top executives of the major G.M. agencies; and approved a decision to proclaim Cadillac as “The new standard of the world” in a coming campaign.
Oh, yes, and Ewanick is also trying to figure out how General Motors — only recently emerged from bankruptcy — ought to market its cars, trucks, crossovers and other vehicles during perhaps the most challenging economy since the Depression.
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“It’s like everything I’ve done in my career led to this,” Ewanick said during a wide-ranging, 60-minute interview in Midtown Manhattan.
And it is “something worth changing your life for,” he added, because helping G.M. recover is “a noble cause” — although maybe not “God’s work,” he agreed with a grin when that term, notoriously used by Goldman Sachs, was suggested to him.
When Ewanick took the job at Nissan, he said, he received 300 e-mail messages, but “the day it came out” that he was leaving for General Motors “I had four, five thousand e-mails,” he added, “from people I did not know,” and soon received dozens of documents, running “seven, eight pages, saying, ‘For what it’s worth, here are some ideas.’ ”
“The pent-up passion, enthusiasm, people have for these brands is huge, and it runs really deep,” Ewanick said. “We need to find a way to channel, to use, that.”
But, he acknowledged, for “the last 30 or 40 years, consumers became so secondary” for G.M. that “they weren’t brought into what we were doing.”
“I believe strongly in ‘consumer first,’ ” Ewanick said, and that will be demonstrated in the company’s new campaigns.
In May, Ewanick moved the Chevrolet account to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom
Group, from offices of Publicis Worldwide, part of the Publicis Groupe. The shift came only a month after the Chevrolet creative assignment had been consolidated at Publicis.