Five-Second Rule
The best promotion of the year began with a tiny TV commercial. Cadillac was launching three models in its high-performance V-Series. The General Motors division finally had the horsepower to challenge BMW and Mercedes on performance — on top of its signature reputation for luxury.
“These days, you can’t have a luxury vehicle without performance credentials behind it,” says Cadillac Advertising Manager Tom Hassett. “Cadillac is given luxury [credentials] very freely, but people don’t give us performance easily at all.”
But a statistic like “0 to 60 in five seconds” sounds dry. The challenge was to make consumers feel it viscerally — and attribute that feeling to Cadillac.
“It came down to owning five seconds and let consumers experience just how fast that is,” says Bill Rosen, chief creative officer for Arc North America.
It was also a chance to extend Cadillac’s now four-year-old effort to skew younger. (The average Cadillac owner is 48; in 2001, it was 67.)
Meanwhile, ad agency Leo Burnett USA was wrestling with Cadillac’s Super Bowl ad buy. “How could we do TV in a fresh way? How could we break through that Super Bowl clutter?” says Burnett Deputy Chief Creative Officer Mark Tutssel. “Then how could we explode that core idea into every communication contact point?”
The eureka idea: a five-second TV commercial that lets viewers live 0-to-60 in real time. It had never been done in the U.S. — the shortest spots had been 10 seconds — and it went straight to the core attribute of V-Series cars. Six spots, set at the head and tail of each commercial pod and run sequentially through the pod, gave Cadillac several short, dramatic hits during the Super Bowl, instead of the one-time wallop so familiar to Super Bowl viewers. Six short spots in each pod gave Cadillac “a number of places where someone could get an impression,” said Michael Wright, Leo Burnett Detroit’s senior VP group account director. (Cadillac also ran 60- and 30-second spots during and after the game, wove V-Series into the Paul McCartney half-time show, and sponsored the post-game show.)
“Five-second spots is a game-changer; we had to convince [network] folks to do it,” Hassett says. “They weren’t saying no; they were saying, ‘How can we get around the way we’re used to selling ads’?”
Ad-planning underway, the marketing team at Cadillac, Burnett (Chicago and Detroit) and Arc eyed Cadillac’s ties to MGM, the Oscars and the Grammys for an entertainment platform. It was a short leap from five-second commercials to five-second films. GM struck a deal with MGM for Be Cool, the sequel to the 1995 hit Get Shorty, partly because Be Cool director F. Gary Gray “is a Cadillac guy,” Hassett says.
Be Cool star John Travolta said, “Everyone has a five-second idea in them,” Tutssel recalls. “Telling an intricate story in 30 seconds is pretty tough; to distill it down to five seconds is a huge challenge, and people are fascinated by it.”
Cadillac hosted the film contest online for two reasons: It wanted to drive consumers to the dealer-locator function on its Web site, and it wanted to engage younger consumers overall.
“User-generated branded content is one of the hottest way to leverage the Web, letting consumers take your brand and make it their own,” Rosen says. Plus, marketing online is “the easiest way for people to participate — they could make a film using a cell-phone camera and submit it right from their phone.”
The site launched Jan. 20, hosted by Chili Palmer — John Travolta in character as the Cadillac-loving gangster from Be Cool. (Cadillac kept Travolta in-character “to keep tying to the theme of the movie itself rather than just having a spokesperson on the site,” says Arc VP-Creative Director Steve Slivka.) The five-second ads ran during the Feb. 6 Super Bowl, the Feb. 13 Grammys and the Feb. 27 Academy Awards, sending viewers to Cadillac-Under5.com to enter the film contest. Be Cool content was posted on the site, including behind-the-scenes videos and five-second clips from the film.
Gray also announced the Cadillac Under 5 contest at the Jan. 20-30 Sundance Film Festival. Gray, Travolta and Be Cool stars Cedric the Entertainer and Christina Milian were contest judges.
Posters and “hero cards” distributed to film students on-campus in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit helped drum up entries (and bring younger consumers to the Cadillac franchise). Why film students? “We wanted talented people to respond to our call to action, and to reach young people, because this is an aspirational brand,” Hassett explains. Adds Rosen: “The purchase decision on cars is notoriously slow. We had to pump fresh blood into the brand.”
The deadline was short — entrants had a mere 12 days to shoot, edit and submit their films. Finalists were posted online Feb. 25 and the winners were announced March 4, the day of Be Cool’s Hollywood premiere.
“We wanted to create a sense of urgency,” Slivka says. “If it sat too long, people would end up not doing it. The key online was not to tell them how fast five seconds is, but to have them actually try it.”
Entrants could see competitors’ films, get immediate feedback on their own, and feel like part of a community, he adds.
Cadillac fielded 2,648 entries, then culled it to 150 for judges to score. “They took it very seriously. They became as invested as we were in picking the winner,” Slivka says.
The top director, Jeff Schmale, won a 2005 Cadillac CTS-V and had his spot showcased in a Cadillac TV spot. Five category winners flew to London for a Be Cool premiere; 20 finalists and 15 runners-up won trips to Los Angeles for a private screening with Gray.
The agency team was surprised by the quality — and amount — of entries. “I didn’t expect more than 50,” Tutssel says. “But it captured the imagination of the public.”
Timing was tight for the agencies, too — and that was the hardest part, Hassett says. “This began with our late-summer concepting for our Super Bowl ads. Then when we saw all the legs it could have, it was fall; the ideas came on quickly. We were jamming hard because it was a good opportunity and we wanted to take advantage of it.”
“We had a running joke about how fast we had to bring it out,” laughs Wright. “When it crystallized, it was fairly quick.”
The sprint paid off: Cadillac fielded 43,000 incremental requests for dealer information, and boosted Web site traffic 260% on Super Bowl Sunday — and an impressive 358% the next day, and 378% four days later.
Sales are harder to correlate — only V-Series’ CTS-V was on the market yet, with STS-V and LXR-V bowing now. “Any correlation between a promotion that ran 11 months ago and sales now is a bit of a stretch,” Hassett admits. But the campaign gave Cadillac a halo beyond V-Series, he says. And Cadillac overtook Mercedes Benz in North American sales, and is hot on the heels of BMW, Tutssel adds.
It wasn’t hard coordinating work between sister shops Arc and Burnett’s two offices, Hassett says, because “the agencies are all of the same character; everyone played critical roles.” Leo Burnett Detroit was lead agency, and the Chicago creative team came up with the idea for five-second spots, he adds (see sidebar).
“GM demands that we embrace the modern world. They’re the first ones to try anything new that’s relevant to their brand,” Tutssel says. “They understand the landscape has changed, and they have an incredible appetite for the new world.”
For the agencies’ promotion experts, the biggest challenge was “creating a program uniquely ownable by Cadillac, and avoiding traditional tactics,” Rosen says. “This campaign couldn’t have been done by any other brand.”
Cadillac has talked about (but not planned) ways to use the contest’s five-second films in future launches. “We see them as assets because they’re unique and bear out a product truth,” Hassett says.
One PRO Awards judge called the campaign “an insider’s kiss back” to BMW’s ground-breaking BMW-films, but Tutssel disagrees: “This is rooted in a truth about the brand, as opposed to creating entertainment around a car. Cadillac cracked the code on the car itself; it was up to us to take it to the next level.”
Hassett concurs: “The V-Series shows we’re in the game.”
FIRST AND SECOND GEAR
Arc and Leo Burnett
Three Publicis Groupe divisions collaborated on Cadillac Under 5: Arc Worldwide and Leo Burnett USA, both Chicago, and Leo Burnett Detroit (formerly Chemistri). The team pulled from Burnett’s creative, media and design staff, and from Arc’s planning, rich-media, interactive and promotion groups. There were copious IMs, e-mail and phone calls between Detroit, Chicago and New York.
“You need a brilliant idea, but you also need every element of the campaign to do justice to the idea,” says Bill Rosen, chief creative officer for Arc North America.
“All projects have tight timelines, but we didn’t want to compromise the vision,” adds Arc VP-creative director Steve Slivka. “Everyone opened the channels to work together.”
