From Like a Rock to Likes and Clicks: Detroit Ad Man Ty Damon Tells All

Transcript

It’s the foundation. By the time it, if you have a good creative brief, good product positioning, strong product differentiation, it’s not about a snappy headline. That’s not what sells product. It’s getting the message that resonates with the customer to the customer. Welcome to the automotive advantage. Grow your business and get smarter in just one hour. Hey, welcome to the Automotive Advantage. We’re super excited to have this guest on the pod this week. This is Ty Damon. Ty. Great to have you.

Fourth generation Adman out of Detroit, which is just a fascinating lead introduction for you. And my son is in the business, so he’s fifth generation. So where we want to go, Ty, you and I know each other for many years. I think in many ways I was thinking about this. You were a mentor to me from an agency standpoint. You ran a huge chunk of business through your career. You recently retired from Jack Morton. What we want to do over the next hour is maybe frame up what an advertising agency was in the classical sense. The transition that you saw through your career in the 90s and 2000s, kind of, I’ll use the term the rapid change here through the COVID years. And then kind of where we’re at on automotive marketing today. But maybe an introduction to talk about your background in the space and all of the work you’ve done from an agency perspective in Detroit in the auto industry.

Well, thanks. Well, I started in the business at 15 years old. My father owned an art studio slash photo studio that exclusively serviced the agencies that worked on automotive. So, you know, back in the day, things weren’t done with computers. You know, an art director at an agency had a concept. They scratched something out. They called up the art studio. The art studio fleshed it out, made it beautiful so the agency could present it to the client. So there was a huge industry.

Frankly, the largest studio support system in the entire country was here in Detroit. So even the salespeople at McNamara Skidmore Art Staff, they had clients in L.A. They had clients in New York. They even had clients in Europe that came here because of the skills of the artists and the photographers painting, retouching or photographing automotive product. There was nobody else in the world. Also related to that, you know, back in the 70s and 80s, there was more footage of 35 millimeter film shot in Detroit than in Hollywood because of all of the training videos that were done back in the day. You know, there was training videos for salespeople, training videos for mechanics, just, you know, huge infrastructure.

Literally hundreds of people that did nothing but support making those training videos. And it was really interesting to see how quickly, I mean, you couldn’t even keep up with the technology. One year you’re doing slideshows that beeped with a cassette tape. And then the next year it’s Betamax. And two years later it’s VHS. Then for Jeep accessories, I pressed a 12-inch video disc that the master cost a million dollars. You can’t even conceive of that. You know, then CD-ROM, then online, and now I’m sure that there’s, you know, some way that they’ve got a proprietary system online where, you know, guys are logging in and watching all these videos. But, you know, so back in the day the infrastructure, the system, the mechanics of what it took to put out advertising in Detroit was really unparalleled anywhere in the world. And, you know, the budgets that went along with that.

me the basis of the client service in Detroit, just so people understand, like, what did you do as an advertising executive for the client? Obviously you were talking about the creative services that you brought to them, but they would have a new car or they would have a new idea. Like, how did all that happen? You know, General Motors had, you know, all types of different parts in Ford Chrysler. Everybody was the same. But, you know, you pretty much had product planning that looked forward five years, however many years, and said, “Okay, these are the vehicles we need to bring to market.”

And they were the ones deciding, you know, general architectures, like, you know, we kind of foresee that there’s going to be a market for a compact SUV. Right? That didn’t exist in 1988. The smallest, what would have been a compact SUV would have been like the Jeep Cherokee or the Blazer. You know, we wouldn’t call those compact. But, you know, somebody said, “No, we’re going to go smaller.” So, product planning people were looking into the future.

You know, they gave the direction to design of what to design. You know, here’s some basic parameters of what we want in a vehicle package. What does it need to do? You know, that’s going to have specific performance characteristics. It’s going to have size characteristics. So, you’ve got product planning, and you’ve got design, and obviously engineering. And these things all overlap. People have to, you know, design a drive train for that vehicle. They’ve got to look at, you know, the functionality of how certain things work, manufacturing. And really, the last step is marketing.

The marketing people, they have very little input, honestly. By the time it gets to marketing, every choice has been made. Here is the Beretta LTZ. Sell it. And by the way, sell 50,000 of them. And then the client says to the agency, “Figure out how to sell 50,000 of these.” And, you know, that collaboration between the marketing clients and the agency is where you’re getting down to the nitty-gritty of how you position the vehicle. And, you know, that is the most important thing. And, you know, a good story about product positioning and getting it right is like the 1995 TOW four-door. So if you take, go back, go back in time, at that 1995 Chevy is Finn’s Feathers and Fursman. If it flies, it dies.

Quail Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, Babe Winkleman Fishing Tour. If it had Finn Feathers refer, Chevy sponsored it. Well, Product Planning said, “We think there’s a market for a full-size luxury SUV. Bigger than a Blazer, but not a Suburban.” So the four-door Tahoe was basically a cut-down Suburban. They, you know, made some black. They put leather in it. They appointed it smartly. That’s a good, that vehicle styling holds up today. You know, yeah, it’s got a two-inch rubber band around the middle, but it was, you know, but that styling holds up. And, you know, they did their research, and the person, you know, there’s a research term called “Share Garage.” So what other vehicle would be in the garage of somebody likely to buy this vehicle? So they did research, and the most likely share of garage for the Tahoe concept they showed was a BMW 5 Series.

So they were really on to something. Okay. The, you know, the TV commercials we were doing at the time were like a rock, and I’d like to talk about that later. But, you know, it was all body bag footage, as we called it. You know, three-quarter ton trucks bouncing, dirt flying, front-end loaders throwing rocks in them. That does not appeal to a guy who’s trying to figure out, he would never have a Silverado in his garage next to his 5 Series. He would never have, you know, the S10 two-door Blazer? No. Okay. Maybe his kit. All right. So they needed to position, they needed to find a place in people’s minds for where does this Tahoe fit?

And the imagery of skiing came to mind. And so at the time, Subaru was the sponsor of the US ski team, which Subaru, US ski team, come on. So, you know, Chevy made the US ski team an offer they couldn’t refuse. Chevy became the official sponsor of the US ski team and the US Paralympian team, and that was a great sponsorship. And, you know, that was a very successful sponsorship, but it was taking a good concept of a vehicle, a package, right? A semi-luxury, not too big, not too small, nicer looking than a station wagon, not a minivan, has some utility. You know, this guy might quail hunt and have dogs and he can pit them in the back.

But, you know, that was just, and that was the total collaboration between, you know, the research people at the agency, the marketing clients. Again, product planning, it was going to be what it was going to be. It was coming. You know, nobody got to pick trim levels or anything by the time it gets to marketing. You just got to figure out how to sell them. But, you know, that’s where the agency, and so when it gets to the agency and the client, everybody’s agreed on the positioning, and, you know, now you get down to the nitty gritty of, you know, taglines.

But that’s the easy part. The hard part is getting the position right. What is this vehicle? Who is it for? What problem does it solve in this person’s life? What image does it project for them? And, you know, on the agency side, then there’s, you know, there’s account people that manage relationship. You know, they fill out TPS reports. Okay? That’s the account people. The creatives, of course, you know, production people that actually produce the advertising. And media planners and media placement. And that’s super, super important because it doesn’t do any good if you’ve got great ads, if they’re being presented to the wrong person.

And it wasn’t like today where your phone spies on you, listens to you, and then feeds up ads. You know, the media planners had to say, “Oh, okay. This guy, he’s got a BMW 5 Series. He likes skiing. I think I’m going to put all my ads on PGA Golf.” And that’s the right place. Right? And so, you know, that’s kind of how the agency and the client collaborate. The thing I saw that was disappointing over time and why I feel I was so fortunate to be in the business when I was in. So, I’m 65 years old. I wasn’t in the Mad Men era that was on the TV show. That’s the 60s.

But you know what? That was racist. That was sexist. I got in in the 70s and it was actually even more fun. Because the budgets were just as big. Everything was just as crazy. But it was honestly a better work environment. And what made magic happen, and I consider the Chevy Like A Rock campaign magic, what made magic happen is an agency that loved the product, lived the product, took it personally that the ads they made worked,

and a client that was willing to take risk and give the agency a little bit of rock. Because nothing happens if you’re not out there pushing the envelope. And what happened over time is that the 80s were a tough time to be on the client’s side. I had a client who had his retirement at his retirement party said, “You know, I know you guys are all here clapping for me, but you do realize that in my entire 30-year career

with Chevy marketing every year we sold less cars than the year before.” Chevy sold one million in pallets in 1967. I don’t even sell one million cars and trucks now, I don’t think. In pallets. spend a lot of time talking about understanding your product and then understanding your customer. And I think that’s a great look at how that is done. What is the product? It’s a four-door Tahoe. Where does it fit? It’s in between a suburban and an estate. Okay, got it. You have to learn everything about it. Then, who is my customer? Okay, it’s a guy that owns a 5 Series BMW that likes skiing and golf.

We talk about this, I think every episode on the pod really is like, for people that are struggling, even if you own a small speed shop making widgets or you make wheels for Corvettes or whatever you do, at the end of the day, most marketing problems can be distilled back down to, do you know your product and do you know your customer? If you know your product and you know your customer, all you have to do is connect the two together. Hopefully it sells, right?

It’s so cool to hear that that’s kind of how it’s always been, you know? Now, today, there’s way more rungs on the ladder, I would say, between a customer and a product. Today, you got Instagram and TikTok and all these other channels where, back then, maybe less options. You could sponsor a golf team or a ski team or what magazine, right? But it’s really cool to see it. Do you just always kind of come at marketing in that direction? Are you always thinking, “Okay, team, client, explain to me the product, explain to me the customer, and then my job is to build something that marries that all together?” Or is there another way that you look at it?

I retired from Jack Morton, I taught at the College for Creative Studies for five years. College for Creative Studies is a college in Detroit. It’s most famous for its automotive design program. Students come from all over the world. Half the students are Chinese and Korean and Japanese coming to Detroit to learn how to be automotive designers. But it has a great advertising design program. And what is special about its program is, you know, people, kids can go all kinds of different schools and get a degree in advertising design. But the kids who go to College for Creative Studies, all their professors are professionals in the business.

We don’t treat them like students. We treat them like employees. I’m sorry. This is not acceptable. I don’t give you an F. I say, “You’re fired.” You know, and you’re going to have to take that and figure out how to make it. So, that program was very much almost an apprenticeship type program. You know, every one of my kids already had a job at the beginning of their senior year. You know, they’d already had three internships. Every agency couldn’t wait for them to come out. And the class I taught was Marketing Strategy, which was the development of the creative brief.

And what a creative brief is, and this is something that, you know, even a local collision shop, they have somebody who’s putting together their Facebook page. And where do I start? What do I do? What do I talk about? Oh, here’s some pictures. No. The creative brief says, “What is the product? Tell me about the product. Tell me the facts, the figures. What’s special?” And, you know, the client has to write all that down. What makes my product unique? How am I different than the shop down the street?

How am I different than the guy who owned this before I took over? So, you know, what am I selling? How is it differentiated? How do I want to position it? Right? Am I…and it’s not that they’re right or wrong. It’s that you decide what you’re going to be and you be consistent. Right? I can be the high touch…forget price. I could be the high touch white glove repair shop. Or I could be the working man’s repair shop. Right? Tommy, boy. We make parts for working class guys. Right? That was just all position. That was all bullshit. Zelensky. Right?

So, it’s…the essence is understanding who you are and if you’re a service, the product is your service. Who you are, what you stand for, what makes you unique, and really important, who your customer is. You can’t afford to be everything for everybody. If you are, then you’re for no one. And be real honest and say, “Okay, wow, this…I’m onto some here. Boy, there’s not another white glove repair shop in town.” Now, the next question is, how many people want that and how many people are willing to pay for that? You know, it was really interesting with Chevy SSR.

So, the Chevy SSR comes out and, you know, hey, you like it or you hate it, it’s no different than the Prowler or any other kind of bizarre one-off vehicle. But, you know, the first year GM had people paying sticker and sold 40,000 of them. And the next year, I mean, it’s halfway through the year and they sold seven. And, you know, the product planning people had said, “Well, you’re gonna sell 40,000 of these a year for five years.” And, you know, my client was kind of freaking out and we, you know, we went back to the agency and did a lot of research and, you know, guess what? If you draw the old overlapping Venn diagram of two-seat vehicles sold in the United States, you know, pickup trucks, convertibles…

Your two, that was about 7,000 and they’d sold 7,000. So, I mean, you could have cut the price of that in half and you’re, you know, you’re not gonna sell. So, you know, knowing who your target audience is and making sure there’s a market out there. And that’s how you be focused. And, you know, for anybody who’s out there and has a small business, all you have to do is Google “Create a brief.” Just Google it. One will come up. It’s gonna have ten questions. You know, I do that all the time when, you know, I get, you know, the little coffee shop up by me. “Oh, hey, Ty. You were marketing. What are you doing?” I’m like, “Here, fill this out.” They just answered all their questions themselves. So that’s a really important thing.

I love the “Creative brief.” We use it all the time. It does, in this day and age where everyone’s moving so fast and it’s hard to take risk, it just… I’ve started meetings with like, “Guys, you’re going to think this is a ridiculous exercise. I need you to just power through this with me. I know you’re saying to yourself, how do you not know these things?” And I’m saying to you, “You probably don’t know as much of them as you think you do either.” Right? So let’s go through this thing. That document defines everything else from there on out. And I see so many people rush this all the time. Just like, “Ah, we don’t really need that. What I need right now is this guy needs an ad for the newspaper and we got to get it out tomorrow.” Without this, this is your source book. This is your foundational kind of document. It’s scary to go forward from there because you don’t have that base. So I love the idea of reinforcing that for everybody.

It’s the foundation. By the time it… If you have a good creative brief, good product positioning, strong product differentiation, it’s not about a snappy headline. That’s not what sells product. It’s getting the message that resonates with the customer to the customer. I’ve asked this question of senior automotive executives, and it’s not a “gotcha” moment, but it’s really, I want to know what their thoughts are, and it’s a very simple question, but it’s like, can you give me an example of great marketing?

What comes to mind when I ask you, give me an example of great marketing? What’s something that you think of either in your past or now that you look at and you go, “aha, man, they nailed it with that campaign.” Absolutely like a rock campaign for Chevy trucks. And, you know, there’s no pride there. I didn’t work directly on that. It was, you know, other people, I implemented it, I didn’t conceive of it, but I watched it happen, and it was just such a great way to differentiate Chevy trucks.

And to put together a cohesive message that separated from the competition. You know, before the Chevy Like A Rock campaign, I don’t know if you guys remember, but there was a series of just ridiculous, goofy ads where a Chevy truck climbs up a mountain. And then Ford did an ad with a Ford F-150 climbing up the mountain, pulling a Silverado. And then Chevy did an ad with the Chevy going up the mountain with the F-150 in the back of the Silverado. I mean, what, it’s just silly, it’s goofy. What’s that telling you about the product? And so, you know, and at the time, the Dodge Ram had just come back out, and it was very unique styling. It was stealing sales from everybody.

If you remember, that was the time when the F-150 went all round in the front, looked real small, so you have the F-150 with kind of a styling that’s turning traditional truck buyer off. Chevy’s just kind of going right along. Those mid-90s Chevy’s were fine. But this Dodge Ram has just blown people’s minds with that old Peterbilt looking front end. So it was do or die for Chevrolet. And Don Gould was the creative director on Chevy.

And the product positioning and the tagline at the time was Chevy the most dependable, longest-lasting trucks on the road. That’s great. We had two people at the agency whose job was to do nothing but keep track of that statistic so that Chevy could keep saying it. Literally. That was their entire job. So, I mean, they’re making $50,000 a year just every week checking state registration databases. And oh my God, oh shoot, a 72 Chevy went to the junkyard dammit. They were keeping track of this because the lawyers made them prove it every time. So anyway, longest-lasting, most dependable trucks on the road. Okay, that’s strong, but it’s not sexy. It doesn’t hit you in the heart.

It doesn’t necessarily make a great ad. And Don Gould had the vision to listen to the Bob Seger song “Like a Rock.” And that story, it’s an autobiographical story about a guy in his 40s looking back over the last 20 years of his life. And the challenges he had faced, and he’s like a rock. The singer of the song is like a rock. And so Don and Rich Weiner and Kathy Speck were the art director and the copywriter team that made every single ad after that for 11 years with that campaign. They were, I mean, they lived that. They owned it. They loved it. They were brilliant. But anyway, that use of that song, the emotion of music, made that personal people. And where I saw it firsthand, and I feel privileged to have been there. So we were in focus groups for the truck.

And with focus groups, you get a mix of people in a room, and some of them are Dodge Ram owners, and some are Chevy owners, and some of them are GMC truck owners. And you know, you talk to them about the product, talk to them about the positioning, ask them what they do in their life, what do you use your truck for. You know, you’re just trying to learn ways that you can connect with the customer. And

so a simple question is asked, well, what what does, you know, like a rock and longest lasting most dependable mean to you. And this guy says, well, I’ll tell you what it means to me. That is the essence of who I am. I am the rock for my family. I am the rock for my friends. I am the most dependable person I know. And if I lost my job at the plant today, on my way home, I could take my Chevy truck, I could go in the woods, I could cut down a tree, I could split that wood, and I could sell a face cord, put gas in my truck, and buy food for my family.

Holy shit. Wow. I guess, I guess there is a connection between that vehicle and how that vehicle is positioned that resonated with that guy, not trucks stacked on top of trucks going up a hill. What is that? And so that was just, I mean, that nailed it. That right there, having that on film made, you know, Bob Seeker, 1.x million dollars a year for 11 years. Because why are you going to, how are you going to beat that? What’s going to beat that campaign?

It feels like at a certain point, we went away from taglines and slogans and marketing got a little more product focused oriented. People were talking more about specs. There was this kind of an engineering focus on like, well, this is exactly why it’s better than that. And that is how we’re going to market it verse like a rock, something that people could feel. What’s your feeling on the balance that someone needs to have between product specs, product market fit, attributes of the thing, verse this aspirational emotional connection? Should every brand have both? Should it be one or the other? How do you think that fits in?

Every brand has to have both. Every campaign has to have both. Let’s just take a simple product. You know, Jamie, one of your shows a few weeks ago was with a guy who’s the number one Corvette salesman in the country. That was a great show. And he’s talking about his customers. Okay. He has Corvette customers who just come in and say, I want a ZR1 because it’s the hottest and it has to be blue and I don’t care what it costs. But he has other customers who come in and say, now what exactly is the gear ratio on the fifth gear, right? And are totally geeked out. So everyone’s different. And, you know, if it’s, if it’s all emotion, then yes, there are people that are not buying on it. But it’s about one of the things that you have to do to get a better understanding of what’s going on in motion. You know, some guy, some guy buying, you know, a three quarter ton to plow snow. And if he’s got 10 of them, it’s, it’s about capabilities and price.

And you have to have a balance. You have to have both. But you know, you just, you’re never going to build a product simply by beating people over the head with facts and figures. Right. I mean, I love the story of the good old days of the auto industry in Detroit, right? Like that’s, that’s the pinnacle. That’s, you know, that’s set your career defined you talk, talk us up to COVID because significant changes to this area, to this industry, to the agencies. What were the budgets like through the eighties, nineties, two thousands, we were talking before just some of the crazy things you did to sell cars, like give us, give us budgets and the wild stuff you did.

budgets were big because the profits were big and volume of vehicles were big. So it was all self reinforcing, you know, General Motors finance department didn’t let the marketing people burn money. But if the marketing people were selling more product than they, they fed the flame. It was, it was good in the eighties because the finance people at Chevy, the sales team and the marketing team really worked together. They weren’t at odds. It became difficult in those pre COVID days when there was the rise of purchasing with Ignacio Lopez. For people don’t know, came in from the outside. He was the purchasing czar of General Motors slash and burn. He made all his people wear their watch on the right side of their body so that they would think different. And he made them wear rubber bands that they could snap kind of like a self flagellations when they had, I guess, evil thoughts about spending too much money. Now, of course, he left General Motors and was convicted as a felon because he stole the plans, the plans for a European assembly plan for Volkswagen when he left General Motors. And he didn’t go to jail, but he got fined millions of dollars and died in disgrace. But anyway, when he was sitting on top of the world at GM, it really everything became contentious and difficult. And it was pretty much a real, you know, kill them all, let God sort them out type of mentality that, you know, whatever marketing was doing was assumed to be wasteful and petty and, you know, self congratulating instead of teamwork. And so, you know, that that caused a lot of strain and really changed things. Also, at that same time, you know, since the dawn of advertising agencies, which really started in the 1800s, when newspapers, which was the only place you could advertise at the time, newspapers, past newspapers, paid agencies to bring them clients. So if I was an ad agency, and I got my client, the local shoe store, to put an ad in the newspaper and that ad cost $100, the newspaper gave me $15. I got a commission paid by the eight by the newspaper. And that kind of morph just to be easier accounting that instead of the client giving the newspaper a hundred bucks and newspaper giving me 15, the client would give the agency 100 and the agency would keep 15 and use 85 to run that. So, you know, that that commission structure, you know, that worked from, you know, the mid 1800s to the to the mid 1900s, 100 years. But there

was just, you okay? And so, you know, the company was making a lot of money. They didn’t add 200% more money. They didn’t add 200% more people. They didn’t double the size of their building. You know, they were making really fat profits. So I think it’s going to take six hours. And I’m not going to pay a lawyer. I want you to write me a will. What’s it going to take? Well, I think it’s going to take six hours and I bill $300 an hour. So you’re going to pay me 1800.

So it went to where the client wrote a scope of work for the agency. Agency and the client agreed on the number of people that was going to take to fulfill that scope of work. Work was done. But on the one hand, in the old days where the agency saw upside not necessarily deserved when the client spending went up. Now there’s incentive on the agency side. The only way they can have any upside is to cut costs.

And they would cut costs by when, you know, some somebody at the agency with a lot of experience making $200,000 an hour leaves. You know, they hired two people making 40 and put 60 in their pocket. And it just created a bad environment that led to mistrust. And the thing that was happening on the client side clearly is, you know, the pressure on the marketing department from the top to be profitable in a domestic auto market that was getting the money. And so, you know, that that lack of trust that really inability to be able to take risk. The work suffered. The work suffered.

One of the other things that seemed to be happening and continues to happen and is going to get even worse now with tech is that when we started this pod, we were talking about all these talented painters and artists and photographers and video and sound. And they were everyone was specialized and they were able to build these amazing things. And today everyone has to be all of those things. It seems like there’s no more like account creative photo sound guy all the way down. It’s like most agencies are like blended account slash creatives. And there might be a photographer who’s also supposed to be the video guy who’s also kind of the social media person. How do you feel about this compression of everyone’s talents into one thing?

work is suffering. It’s not as good. And, you know, I’ve seen it. When I started in 1975, they were taking pictures with, you know, 8 by 10 cameras on photo emulsion. And, you know, retouchers are using pen and ink and gouache paint and airbrush. So what I was seeing in 1975 was with the photography with color photography. It was only that much different than 1875. And then, you know, it started to change. Can’t believe all was honestly one of the first agencies in the country to go to desktop publishing.

And some interesting things happened when that happened. So, for example, in the old days, a copywriter agency would bang out copy for an ad or a catalog on his manual typewriter sheet and yellow paper. He left it on his corner of a desk. Somebody from one of the typesetting companies came by at five o’clock, scooped up all these yellow pieces of paper, worked all night. This town was 24 seven from May till August. There were people setting type, drawing, retouching, developing film. Anyway, the typesetter would type set all that, put it out in galleys, and it would be at the agency at seven o’clock in the morning when the people came back. And the shoemakers else kept that thing humming. Well, we go to, so you had the copywriter wrote it. Before it got picked up, the proofreader looked at it. Then the typesetter picked it up. It got typeset.

And then it got put together in the ad. Well, we go to desktop publishing. So now the copywriter’s writing in a computer at the time hand in an eight and a half inch floppy to the art director is putting it into some rudimentary page layout program and picking stuff. And stuff gets put together and it goes to the copy editors for the final check and stuff’s horrible. And it’s things that matter. I mean, you can’t make a mistake on the trailer towing spec chart in a catalog and then print five million copies. So what is happening? We had to have a, like an all hands on deck stop the presses where all these errors coming from. Well, guess what? What was happening is the writers are being sloppy and making mistakes.

The copywriters, they don’t really pay attention to the specs. That’s a product information guy. It gets to the typesetter at T. P. Henry at three in the morning and they go, oh, that’s that’s 4.2 axle ratio on the Blazer K5, 447. And they fix it. And there’s just a typesetter. They don’t even know anything, but they’ve typeset it 18 times already and they know what’s right. And so there were all these errors in the system. We had to hire more product information guys and more copywriters. But the specialization, you know, some of it going away makes sense because of speed to market, but it absolutely is not better. The quality of the writing was better when somebody just wrote, you know, the quality of the typesetting and the design of the typesetting. The design of the type was better when that’s all somebody did. And, you know, I played around with Chad GPT both on, you know, words and pictures and it’s great. And, you know, it’ll get me, it’ll get me from zero to junk really, really fast. And I like it for that, but it doesn’t get you from junk to brilliance. It doesn’t. There’s always something weird. There’s always some odd and, you know, that that that pressure of speed and cost and the blending of skills is frankly not not a good thing.

And every dime they spend on the quality of the production value of the marketing they do, people know it, you know, people, you know, what, what hurt the Corvette in, you know, C4, C5, Orange Peel Paint, Little Tykes and Terrier, you know, I had a C5, Z06. They had the exact same steering wheel as my wife’s Cavalier. Okay. Corvette did not make the jump into sharing garages with 911s until they got serious about the product and that the quality and the engineering and even the style could hold up. And so, yeah, don’t, don’t, don’t have your niece do your social media for your business.

I want to just end the pod there, but I know we’ve got so much more to go on. But I want to get to the modern side of this and what time. Yeah, I know for sure. Let’s get to the, again, you know, agencies have this amazing run. Detroit really leads the entire marketing world. We see a decline in the domestic auto industry decline in the agencies because of the funding. Give me to 2020 COVID. We have a major shake up and then the Detroit agencies now are basically gone. I don’t, I don’t want to. They’re gone. They’re gone. Tell me what’s going on right from COVID now. What’s, what’s up.

the trend that’s really happened with the trade agencies in, you know, what we’ll call the 21st century is the decline of the AOR. And AOR stands for agency of record. But, you know, when we were in AOR, we set it stood for any old request. Client owns you. They say, do this, you do it. They’re paying all the bills. But with an AOR, you know, everything went to the agency. They, they had a, you know, the good thing is they had a holistic view of the client’s marketing problem.

It gave them a lot of work to work on. You know, you got to work on sexy stuff and maybe not so sexy stuff, but it all balanced out. It was, it was a symbiotic relationship. And then it really started with, with Chrysler when they were going through their troubles, you know, before GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. So, you know, let’s say around, you know, 2000, where they kind of said, you know, we, this isn’t working for us. Having one agency that has 300 people that just work on Chrysler that we pay for every day.

We’re just going to hire Jamie to make us this TV ad. And they started piecing things up. And all of a sudden it wasn’t the ad agency that did the ads that also did the catalogs. It was somebody else doing the big time TV spot. And that was social media. The agencies really didn’t know how to do social media. So now you’ve got, now you have three agencies because you’ve got, you know, a collateral agency, a broadcast agency and a social media agency. And they had PR agencies. And then there were, you know, other types of digital products. Now I’ve got an agency that just does your website because the creative is irrelevant. I mean, I was just building a new Colorado.

I’m sorry. Chevy.com. If you put me in a way back machine and I woke up and it was back in 1999, it’s not any different. You know, so things have gotten fragmented. They’re not working together. I don’t think it’s better. I don’t know if it was inevitable because of the price pressures. Ty, you know, this hits home because at one point, look for a little Chevrolet performance. I had eight agencies that were working for me when we had brand day meetings. We still had an agency record at the time.

We over that. But, you know, there were eight agencies at the table. And then I think you and I have a fun story. We share your first day at helping me at Chevrolet performance. What was your first brand day like? again, if you’ve never worked in Detroit, this is why we wanted to do this, Ty. So people can understand. So me, right? I’m a content creator. I worked at the magazines. I know social media a little bit. Jamie’s like, “Hey, I need help in General Motors.” So my first brand day, he tells me, he says, “Don’t fucking say a word.”

Don’t you fucking say… Yeah, don’t you say one word to anybody. Even if someone asks you a fucking question, don’t say a word. So I go in, huge table, all these agency people. How many people? This is like 30 maybe. Account people. I don’t know what an account manager is. I don’t know what an account director is. I’m just here to like… I thought we were just posting on Instagram, you know? And then over… It took me a decade to learn what an AOR is, how all these people play together, why Jack Morton can do this, and MRM can do this, and 110 can do this, and how all this works together, and the inner-connectness of it all. And, you know, to the question, it’s like, I think they think it’s cheaper to piecemeal these things out, but now you’ve got a lot of people doing the same thing, fighting over territory. Well, is YouTube technically a social channel, or do I own it?

Ty’s point though is that there still wasn’t one central media that had control of the brand. I agree. I think it’s the biggest one. 100%. Just imagine if you were, when you build a house, you hire a general contractor. That general contractor manages the subs. How could you build a house if every morning you had to go over there, which is what Jamie had to do, and there’s the bricklayer and the carpenter and the guy doing the landscaping, and the painter, they know there’s only one pie of money.

So they’re fighting for attention. They’re fighting for the money. That’s not the way to get the best work. And, fun fact, the bricklayer also can be the electrician if you would let him. So he’s fighting with the electrician to steal some of his. It’s just, yeah, the whole thing’s gnarly. But that’s, yeah, but it’s not the way to get… The electrical’s not gonna pass inspection if the bricklayer didn’t. And one thing that I didn’t take for granted, or I didn’t understand until I was 40 years old, maybe,

creative directors, real good creative directors who are really in control of a brand, cannot be a likable, fun person to be around. They have to protect the brief, the brand, everything that goes out the door. And I used to think, why are these creative directors so mean to me? I’m just trying to do my own little thing. It would be cool here. And now I realize the role of a good creative director, the role of an AOR that’s working perfectly, where they know everything, they understand 360 degrees around this brand, and they can say, no, we’re not gonna do that because it doesn’t fit with what we’re trying to do. It doesn’t fit with who our customer is. That is a role that they’re probably almost gone at this point because everything’s piecemealed out. But, man, I now take for granted how awesome it was to have good ones back in the day.

Like the old established agency people often— this may piss people off— often knew the product and the brand better than the client. A hundred percent. No, a hundred percent. Because they were— like, time. Four generations into this, his family talks about it Thanksgiving dinner. Like, this is their life, is the future of General Motors or whatever OEM they’re serving. Yep. Where are we today? Tell me where we are for agencies in Detroit, and how in the hell are people selling cars today? Take me there.

know, all the supply issues and tariffs and everything settles out, it’s unsure. Obviously, people are keeping their cars longer. They’re keeping their cars longer for two reasons. They’re built better and they last longer, and they can’t afford to buy a new car. So that’s stretching out. So that’s just pressure right there because, you know, the old, you know, you churn them and turn them, and people on 24 to 36 months leases, and you’re cranking out cars, and somehow the used market is absorbing them, you know, that’s gone too.

So, you know, because vehicles have gotten so expensive, it’s slowed things down with, you know, the turn of vehicles. Somehow, manufacturers haven’t had to cut prices, prices just keep going up. So demand’s down, prices are up. I don’t know, that’s not what I learned in Econ 101, but somehow it’s worth— And so I just think it’s a time that no one knows what is coming. The future is unequivocally the entire explosion of the dealer franchise retailer. So right now if I want to buy a vehicle, yeah there’s Carvan and this other stuff out there, but they’re nipping on the margins. I go to a dealership where some entrepreneur has invested millions of his own money to build a beautiful palace. Of course financed by the manufacturer so he’s got them for years. But that entrepreneur has invested his money in this business. That business has huge cost structures. He’s got payments, he’s got employees, he’s got this thing. I buy my vehicle there, I likely take my vehicle there for service. I probably trade in my vehicle there. And that whole machine, you know the manufacturers feed that with new product, but it’s really the independent franchise dealer where the rubber meets the road.

Marketing makes people go to a certain dealer because they have an affinity for that product. It was really interesting and don’t let me veer too far off and get back to this, but it was really interesting when General Motors in the early 90s hired Ron Zarello from Bosch & Lomb. And he was going to come in and be the marketing czar for GM. And he was all about brand management. He brought in all these minions who told everybody in General Motors marketing, they were all idiots and they didn’t understand that the brand was not Chevrolet,

that the brand was Corsica. Beretta. Let me lay out some other things you’ve never heard of. So the thinking there with this brand management that they were trying to bring in was that, you know, you need to position the messaging not around Chevrolet brand or the Chevrolet dealership, but around the nameplate. Well, that was that was stupid because it’s not how people buy cars. You know, we all know that there’s plenty of people that walk in their local Chevy dealership and says, “Hey, Jamie, my Impala is two years old. I want something new. What do you got?” And Jamie says, “Oh, I got this Chevy SS. It’s the thing for you.” “Okay, cool. Thank you. I trust you. I’ll get it.”

So right now we still have the key brand is the nameplate. The secondary brand is the dealership. In the future, when a car service is just an app on my phone, the brand is Turo. I just I just get my phone out and say, “Hey, Jamie, when are we going to be done?” “Oh, we’re going to be done about six.” “Great. Hold on a minute. Where am I going? I’m going over to my parents’ house.” “Okay, I need something here at six.”

And something picks me up. Now, if I’m going on a hot date, I might say, “Oh, I want that to be this nameplate of car.” But the selling experience, the investing my money and my image for seven or eight years in a product, that’s gone. Transportation is going to be an app on the phone. So what that means, it means not very good things for the future of the dealer network or the big time automotive ad agency.

Because you’re still those app companies will, Uber will still run ads. But the positioning will be, “Who is Uber? What does Uber do for me in my life? How does Uber fulfill me?” But the brand, you know, if you look at the prospectus from Uber from the day they started, their mission was to not have drivers. They wanted to be an app before there were iPhones. They had that vision that cars are going to be an app. We’re going to have to have drivers for 20 years. But once autonomous cars are here, the app is the brand.

And of course, you know, people still have Rolex watches and coach purses. And, you know, so they’ll still be they’ll still be an affinity for the image. You know, obviously, people have vehicle needs for work product. You know, I’m not I’m not talking. An app’s not going to plow the parking lot. But for the masses, it’s that that’s going to that’s that is a fundamental nuclear bomb on the whole thing. an interesting thing recently that was like you can tell where a brand is by a car brand is by if you say the brand or if you say the model. So if you have a supercar and someone asked you what kind of car do you have, you just say the brand. Oh, I have a Ferrari. Oh, I have a McLaren. Oh, I have a Bentley.

If you ask someone what kind of car do you have and they say they don’t say, oh, I have a Chevrolet. They say, oh, I have a Corvette. Oh, I have a Silverado. Right. So the delineation is if you can feel comfortable saying the brand, it’s an exotic aspirational brand. If you have to say, like, I have a grand sport like I want you to know that it’s even a little up from a Corvette. But I would never say I have a General Motors. Right. You never say that. So I just always thought there was a funny way to break it.

Don’t forget in about 2002 GM put little one inch by one inch GM things, which, you know, any self respecting person with some dental floss. But get that thing off before they left the dealership. But the chick lit, they called it. The chick lit, the bug. Yeah. done some really big deals. Talk about Dale Earnhardt and marketing with with that brand. Well, you know, that that was another great way to. Leverage an image and spread it over the entire Chevrolet brand. So, you know, if you think back mid 90s, the black, I mean, the quintessential NASCAR, the black number three, Dale Earnhardt, Goodwrench car.

The money that went into NASCAR from Chevrolet, from Goodwrench. OK, that was not to sell front wheel drive Monte Carlos. OK, that was to promote the Goodwrench brand and the Chevrolet brand that they’re winners because people want to be associated with winners. I mean, who better than Dale Earnhardt and the agency creative team came up with an ad campaign. We ran it for five or six years of using the Tasmanian devil as, you know, an embodiment of Dale Earnhardt. And that again, that was just. There was nothing about technology.

Right. We all know this is a rear wheel drive, you know, two frame chassis race car and a front wheel drive, two door lumen called the Monte Carlo. Writers. It was it was the image and it was great. It made it made people proud to own Chevrolets. You know, people wanted to see that it was winter. It was it was it was great for Woodgood wrench. It had a huge effect on the tax. The Goodwrench tax didn’t leave their dealership and go to the Ford dealership because they like the fact that there were ads on TV that said Goodwrench.

And that wasn’t Goodwrench spending that money. It was Chevy spending that money. But again, people saw the big picture of how this all supported each other. A funny story with Dale and Tasmanian devil. So one thing Jack Morton did is we did tours for GM, you know, product tours going around. And of course, at NASCAR, you know, we had a tour and it went around a giant multiple semi trucks. I went to every race and set up and we had all kinds of Chevy product you could sit in and talk to product specialists. And we bought an old race car from Childress and put a door in it so people could sit in it and get their picture taken. And this is pre digital was the late 90s. So we took Polaroids and as Chatskis, we we handed out t shirts and we handed out little tattoos, temporary tattoos of the Tasmanian devil and the three.

Well, I had a new a new client and she had come on to the Monte Carlo brand and she’d been in a job a few weeks and she didn’t know anything about racing yet. And she said, hey, you know, I want to go down and it happened to be Daytona. I want to go down. I want to I want to see a race. I want to see how this works. I want to see the display. I want to see what we’re doing with the people. And I get down there and everything’s humming. It’s beautiful, sunny, crowded. We’re getting people’s names and taking Polaroids and people are, you know, eight year old kids are getting tattoos on a forum. Like go, you know, the back of house and there I see the six foot by six foot wall of fame that happens when, you know, 20 something year old guys on the road and NASCAR, female NASCAR fans with a few too many beers and tattoos and Polaroid cameras all come together. And I’m like, oh, my God, I slammed this thing down. I’m like, oh, yeah, no, right around here is where we have it. So, yeah, that was that that that was fun. But but even then, again, when you think about the power of the brand,

you know, there are people that have number threes tattooed. There’s somebody’s got one on their face somewhere. Right. And that is, you know, the best you can do to have somebody identify with your brand is going into F1. Yeah. Is that going to do for Cadillac? What Dale and NASCAR did for Chevy? I don’t know. I I think it’s worth a try. You know, it’s it’s it’s it’s an uphill battle. The you know, the research shows over and over and over again that, you know, I guess what would they be now? You know, the millennials are into Formula One. Period. End of story. You I don’t care what you have with NASCAR. You know, that’s grandpa’s racing.

You know, the millennials are following English Premier League soccer. They’re following Formula One. So it’s it’s a worthwhile effort. You know, I think I think what Chevrolet did with Corvette. At Daytona and Le Mans is testament that that did change attitudes that did get, you know, Porsche owners to say, wow, maybe. And so I think Cadillac and Formula One, they have to try. Give me the Manchester United story and can you disclose the amount of money that costs? Oh, yeah.

would have been around 2010. Chevrolet was changing the way they were going to or General Motors was changing the way they were going to market globally. So in the past, there might have been the same product that’s called a Chevrolet in North America. And it was probably also called a Chevrolet in Brazil. And it was called a Chevrolet in Middle East. But it was called a Holden Australia. It was called a Opel in Germany. And it was called a Vauxhall in England. And Chevy was getting into the China market and had a lot of vehicles. Buick had always been strong there. You know, they kind of had a bottom tier luxury status in China that they’ve earned and maintained over the years. And Chevy was kind of coming in below that and they were going to market them as Chevrolets.

So Chevrolet all of a sudden needed a positioning that would work globally that they never had before. So, you know, as the agency, we looked at the portfolio of NASCAR. No ducks unlimited. FLW fishing tour. That’s not going to play in China. What is there? There was really only two things that you could associate a car brand with that worked globally other than motorsports. And that was music or football. And by football, I mean soccer. It was the only thing. So it was the natural place to go. What was interesting is at the time we did a lot of research to justify this sponsorship. Back in that time, so let’s call it 2007, there were more hardcore Manchester United fans in China than there were people in England.

The Chinese don’t have professional sports. So they follow Formula One and they follow English Premier League soccer. And you know, Chevy did a deal. It was $77 million a year for seven years. How much did that come out to? $576 million. They had the bow tie on the jersey. You know, based on the literally billions of impressions, it panned out. What was crazy is six months after Chevy became the official vehicle of Manchester United, which was the Dallas Cowboys of being his Premier League soccer, sorry, New England Patriots, I mean, the dynasty.

Six months after Chevy decided to pull Chevrolet out of England. I mean, some things never change, you know. Some lessons are hard to learn, I guess, because it feels like we still do stuff like that. You have to indulge me with a story about Manchester United. So the way we positioned the Manchester United sponsorship in the United States, who really, other than millennials, didn’t younger people, didn’t really care much about English Premier League soccer. We took the whole soccer thing and put two different spins on it. Chevy sponsored, where they for years had sponsored youth baseball, we transitioned it into youth soccer. So a Chevy dealership could pick up the phone, call an 800 number, say, you know, I’m in Livonia, Michigan, and some of you would say, great, you’re going to sponsor Livonia Red Hawks, you know, send, you know, give me your credit card number, boom. So all of a sudden, Chevy is on millions of little kids jerseys in the United States.

The other thing is, we put together a charity component. I found an association called One Row Football. And a One Row Football invented an indestructible soccer ball that could be used in the third world. Because what was happening is first world well-meaning people were saying, oh my god, look, these kids are playing with a ball made out of twine and rags. We’ll go to Walmart, buy a whole bunch of balls for three dollars and ship them to Africa. And because of the thorns and the tough conditions, they’d pop in 10 minutes. So this ball was the same

composition of plastic that Crocs are made out of. And it had a certain stiffness of sidewall and a valve. So you could run over it with a bulldozer and then like a rubber ducky, it just went, it popped right up. So Chevrolet became the official sponsor of that. And over three years gave away 1.5 million soccer balls all over the world. Every, you know, in the most abject property. And we were doing a series of videos

when we would, you know, pass out balls in different places. So, you know, we were in a favela in Brazil. We were in Juarez, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, India, all over the world. And one we were doing was China. And so we go over to a rural province of China, we’re about three hours out of Shanghai. And Wayne Rooney, who again, the Tom Brady of English Premier League Soccer, the top player in the world at the time, he was going to do a clinic for these kids from this Chinese province. And we would film it and put it on social media. And Wayne happens to be about, you know, 200 pounds with slightly balding, blondish hair and a beard. Now, he is one of the premier athletes in the whole world. But that’s the general shape of his body.

And I get to the school a couple hours early just to make sure everything’s set up. And the second I get out of the car, I’m swarmed. I have dozens of little Chinese kids climbing on me because frankly, I’m the first white person I’ve ever seen in the flesh. Wayne Rooney’s coming to their school. So I’m just like, oh my gosh, and I’m telling the interpreter, like, no, I’m nobody. No, don’t, don’t, I’m nobody. And the kids all had their autograph books. I’m like, no, no, no. Well, then they all start crying. They’re on the ground sobbing. And she goes, just sign them. So I sign like 20 autograph books. And then they got all calmed down. And then half hour later, Wayne Rooney came. Somewhere in the provinces of China, my autograph is in some kids book.

that about sums up advertising in Detroit. Yeah. Time. I mean, brilliant stuff. And that’s just it’s a life that people just don’t get exposure to. And I think anymore, I don’t, I don’t ever see any admin like you being around. You did say you’re, you’re going to put some memoirs together and you’re going to try to put some thoughts together and maybe put a book out there on your experiences. Is that, I think it’s, I think it’s a moment in time that needs to be captured. You know, it really is, you know, it’s not to say it’s, I personally think it’s worse now. I, I, but it’s different. And, you know, the good and the bad, it should be, it should be down. It should be memorialized. Input down.

I got a question for you. What do you, when you get exposed to someone like this, who’s really lived it through the good times, not that it’s bad now, but I think it’s tougher, but what’s your feeling after listening to Ty for an hour and a half? I would love at one point in my life to live in the good times. I feel like every, as soon as I show up somewhere, people are like, man, 10 years ago was crazy with these crazy budgets. Now you got to do everything yourself. It is, I mean, it is different now. I think it is, there’s still cool experiences now. There’s still cool projects now that, you know, everything isn’t that bad, but I do, I can’t even imagine how good it was in the eighties and nineties, you know, being in Detroit, especially because I feel like the risk tolerance was higher. And I feel like the ability for people to make a risky decision and then stick with, like many of the things Ty talked about said, we ran that for five years, for seven years. Brands aren’t even around for two years anymore. So like, just to be able to see something start and then see it through, because this type of marketing and advertising takes repetitions to work and to just everything now, so throw away. It’s like, I just put it up, how to do it. We’ll never talk about that again. We’re moving on to the next thing. That iterative thing is fun sometimes, but I do long for these days of like, we have a good plan, like a rock. It’s going to sound weird the first time I pitch it, but 10 years from now, it’s going to be iconic, you know.

Some generational marketing, right? Yeah. The dealership level, that’s iPhone 2. Well, quantity of analytics is making the insights worse. Okay. It wasn’t good in the old, old days when people just pulled shit out of their ass. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Well, it’s not professional. And then there started to be some structure and there started to be some discipline. And no, we’re going to learn. We’re going to glean insights from this data and be better. And data was tough, you know, to run three days worth of focus groups and to pay the people to show up and to ship in, you know, a clay product with aluminum foil, chrome bumpers that had to be pushed around on a reliable truck and 20 clients and 20 agency people. That focus group session cost, you know, in today’s dollars, $300,000,

but you got some real insights out of it. Now for nothing, you can run Google analytics. But every time I would, you know, towards the end, I would sit through a presentation, it would be, you notice the left bar is taller than the right. You notice that these things go up and down over time. Like, yeah, great. You have a million facts, but I don’t, what do I take away? How do I, what did I learn to make the next ad better? And so all these, all these analytics are not leading to better product and better insights. It’s just more stuff.

Yeah, I think you can apply that to a lot of things. I remember I was in a meeting with Greg Sadowitz and our boy, Gorgeous Rob, back in the day. And Gorgeous Rob was talking about all this data that they had on the e-comm side. And Greg said, well, man, we have all of this data and yet we still don’t know a single fucking thing. It’s like, it’s so true. You can get tied up in it. There are entire agencies built on just doing analytics now where they come in and say, well, you can see this, this, and this. And, you know, we all know you can make any graph, say whatever you need it to say, depending on what the mood is in the room. So yeah, it’s funny, the more we have, the further away we are from the Jolly Green Giant and like a rock and these long lasting things that really had cultural impact. So I would say for me, that’s, I would love to see that again. I’d love to see someone pull off something that big again.

And maybe to put a bow on it, it goes back to knowing your product and knowing your end customer and having the right admin in position to connect the two. I agree. Is that the pod? That’s the pod.

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