EMINEM x CHEVROLET "SUPER BOWL XLV COMMERCIAL"

Super Bowl Edition :: Chevy Spots Before the Big Game

General Motors' Chevy brand is back in the Super Bowl with five spots for varying models including Cruze, Silverado and Volt. We wrote about what to expect earlier, but the spots have already been made public on YouTube and on Chevy's Facebook page. You can see them all here. What do you think of them?

Chevrolet Volt Gets A Smartphone App

General Motors is touting the Chevrolet Volt as a technological tour-de-force, so it’s only natural that the range-extended electric vehicle is getting its own phone app.


The General joins Mercedes-Benz and other automakers in tapping the power of smartphones to connect people with their cars and a suite of services. We knew GM was working on an app for the Volt — OnStar prez Walt Dorfstatter said so when we talked to him about OnStar’s push into China — but it wouldn’t say much about it before unveiling it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. What it’s come up with is pretty cool.

OnStar’s Mobile Application will let Chevrolet Volt owners use their phones to start charging the car, lock the doors and even turn on the air conditioner at any time even from miles away. The program provides real-time updates on how much juice is in the battery via text message or email, and will even tell you how much gas you’re using when the engine kicks in. GM says the feature will give owners unprecedented control of, and information about, their car.

“The Chevrolet Volt ushers in a new era of automotive technology and calls for a new level of connectivity and control,” Dorfstatter said.

GM says it will help drivers “maximize the environmental benefits of owning a Volt” by allowing them to schedule exactly when the car is drawing power from the grid. That will allow people to charge the cars when rates are lowest. Other features include:

• Real-time info about the car’s fuel economy when the gasoline engine is driving the generator when the battery goes flat.

• Remote starting of the vehicle.

• Remote locking and unlocking of the doors.

• Remote starting of the air conditioner while the car while plugged into the wall to preserve battery range.

GM says Volt owners also can receive a monthly diagnostic report and maintenance reports on their cars, along with the standard safety features available through OnStar. The application works on the Apple iPhone, the Motorola Droid and the Blackberry Storm, and GM says it also will be available on a mobile browser for other smartphones.

The Volt is slated to roll off an assembly line in Detroit by the end of the year.

HOW FACEBOOK AND TWITTER CAN MOVE THE METAL

DETROIT (AdAge.com) -- Automakers and dealers are chasing millions of customers who spend an increasing amount of time each day on social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

But what kind of content is appropriate for dealers to put on a Facebook page? How should they get started? How much does it cost? And does it really help sell cars?

"Moving the Metal: How Automotive Dealers Can Take Advantage of Social Media," an Automotive News-Advertising Age white paper available Aug. 16, addresses those issues. Also, on Thursday, Aug. 19, Automotive News will offer a webinar on the topic.

The auto industry will spend about $1.2 billion this year on social media advertising, according to consulting firm Borrell Associates Inc. And that number is projected to grow to $4.6 billion by 2015.

Forrester Research Inc. says social media is the fastest-growing segment in the interactive marketing category.

For dealers, the bottom line is that it doesn't take a large investment to increase social media business. Even the CEO of Dealer.com, one of the leading vendors selling social media services to dealerships, says the best way for dealers to get started is to identify and support a single dealership employee who already is a social media user, and use that person to start growing a local network.

With an estimated 142 million Facebook users in the U.S. and a worldwide total of more than 500 million, the auto industry has no choice. The customers are present in social media. The auto industry has to go there.

"Everybody's trying to tackle this beast called social media," said Joe Castle, a Chicago-area dealer at Castle Auto Group (Buick-GMC-Chevrolet). "'There's nothing to be scared of' is the moral of the story."

SXSW: IT'S NO SUNDACE, BUT IT'S MAKING STRIDES

Brands Flood Festival, but Confab Has Yet to Hit the Over-Commercialized Saturation Point

If you were worried about South by Southwest becoming the next Sundance, think again. Record attendance and more sponsors and brand activations than ever would suggest the leading indie music and tech summit in Austin, Texas, reached its over-commercialized saturation point this year, with badges to get into the interactive portion alone up 40% to 10,000-plus attendees and 11 lead sponsors. But those at the festival think SXSW has a ways to go before it reaches the Paris Hilton/nightclub/guerrilla-marketing lows of Park City, Utah's annual movie and celeb summit.

Digital Privacy Among Top Issues Discussed at SXSWi Conference

Creativity's Teressa Iezzi Explains Why Foursquare Was a Winner and Why Facebook, Google is not a natural (or as I like to say "Organic") place for non-media consumer brands to congregate, so marketers such as Pepsi, General Motors' Chevrolet and Levi's focused more on improving the show's utility and navigation rather than pushing their products (though a fair share of product sampling and branded tents could be found, too). Far from complaining, fans were rewarding many of the sponsors with positive tweets, check-ins to branded accounts on Foursquare and Gowalla, and joining Facebook fan pages. The only brands that suffered were the ones whose marketing efforts seemed too blatant or forced.

Microsoft's Bing, for example, offered attendees free taxi rides within a certain radius of downtown Austin -- on the condition that riders must first download the Bing mobile app.

Such force-fed marketing flew in the face of what many attendees deemed to be the ultimate place for viral, self-selecting marketing and applications. After all, this was the same place where Foursquare launched just one year ago.

"The bar's pretty high for authenticity," said Tony Weisman, president of Digitas, Chicago, whose client Miller Lite was a lead sponsor and hosted a contest for independent web producers to have their own short films sponsored by the beer. "It's not overrun by brands yet; it's still principally about ideas, not about posing."

Having purpose

"You have to create an emotional connection back to the brand. It's a micro-audience that's going to be savvy and very finicky -- a super-consumer that's hard to win over," said Doug Aken, chief engagement officer of digital-marketing agency Mr Youth, who has worked with Pepsi on previous campaigns but was not involved with any SXSW efforts. "You would need to really do something unique to stand out -- it's not just creating noise for the sake of creating noise."

Yet as blogs continued to decry the death of SXSWi as an idea platform and the abundance of corporate sponsorship at what has become the country's leading technology summit, brands emerged largely unscathed.

GM's Chevrolet, for example, provided Volt-branded power strips for attendees to charge their laptops and phones, and also partnered with location-based social media app Gowalla to provide free rides in Chevy Equinox crossovers to the conference for attendees who checked in at the airport. Considered late to the social-media party two years after Ford found early success with its Fiesta efforts in 2008, Chevy was declared the festival's biggest marketing winner by blogs, Twitter users and local outlets like the Austin Statesman.

The Chevy Volt, which will have a soft launch in late 2010 before a full rollout in early 2011, is also actively trying to reach the under-34 set, an age group whose failure to embrace GM's other vehicles contributed to GM's bankruptcy. So Chevy activated its on-site vehicles with QR codes to drive users to a microsite, as well as a strong Twitter presence to engage viewers on site.

Pepsi also ramped up its second annual sponsorship of SXSW to activate branded experiences around SoBe Life Water, Mtn Dew and Pepsi. PepsiCo sponsored a Podcast Playground for podcasters to host quiet broadcasts and conduct interviews with key thinkers at the show, as well as a webcam appearance by LL Cool J to announce his new music-based social media project, Boomdizzle. SoBe hosted a "re-skinning" photo booth to promote the drink's new label, and Mtn Dew's Green Label Sound record label hosted several music showcases.

"As a lead partner, we want to be asking attendees, 'What's the issue? How can we make the event better?'" said Bonin Bough, Pepsi's director-social and digital media. "We want to add value and make ourselves more integrated into the experience, and in turn we get to learn early how to use these new technologies to transform retail purchase behavior."

CHEVY USES SXSW AS A PLATFORM TO KICK-OFF SOCIAL MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY PUSH

Program Is Part of Automaker's Plan to Spend 30% of Marketing Money on Digital in 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Chevrolet's making a big splash at South by Southwest Interactive this year, and it's just the beginning of the automaker's planned 30% commitment to digital this year.

"This is not a nine-day one-off," said Christopher Barger, General Motor's director of social media. "Everything we're doing here needs to have applications we can build on beyond Austin."

Returning from nosedive

This program is one of the first major social-media and technology campaigns from a Big Three automaker other than Ford Motor since the industry took a nosedive in 2008. But Mr. Barger said Chevy's social media, augmented reality and mobile programs at SXSW are not intended to steal the digital-savvy spotlight from Ford. Instead, they're test pilots for the embattled automaker, which Mr. Barger said plans to commit about 30% of its marketing money to digital this year.

Chevrolet is launching an extensive digital campaign at the music, film and interactive festival, including a tie-in with Austin, Texas-based Gowalla, where users check in from their phones around the city to get messages and SXSW offers from the General Motors brand. For example, those flying into Austin can check in at the airport for a free ride downtown in an Equinox.

"The reason we're doing this here is so really smart tech people can make suggestions," Mr. Barger said of the swarms of digital agency and technology people that descend on Austin every March. "This is a place for us to learn. How do we apply this to the rest of the marketing we'll be doing moving forward?"

Strides in digital innovation

Chevrolet has also affixed QR codes on the hoods of cars that, when photographed with a camera phone, will launch microsites with features info. Chevy's also released the iReveal app to view three-dimensional, augmented reality models of cars on the streets of Austin. While none of these programs -- save free rides from the airport, of course -- sound revolutionary, it's a good start for an automaker that has fallen behind Ford on digital innovation. Mr. Barger said that while GM has kept its eye on Ford like any company does with a competitor, it's not looking to emulate what Ford has done in social or digital media.

"If really all you're doing when building a strategy is looking to what others have done, you're not going to be successful," he said of GM's plans for digital vis-a-vis Ford. "You need to draw attention to your own brand and find something unique to you."

Chevy has also handed out eight cars for teams to road trip to Austin from all corners of the country, while completing missions determined by Twitter followers along the way and tracking their progress through OnStar and Facebook, though the idea to put people in a car and have them document their experience through social media bears some resemblance to Ford's Fiesta Movement.

IN THE MEANTIME: DAMON DASH PRESENTS...BLAK ROC

Though Damon Dash may not be dancing in all of your favorite Jay-Z videos anymore or screaming on executives about how he and his team is not being treated fairly. He is still hard at work bringing something new, fresh and edgy to the hip-hop culture just as he has done in the past. With the help of his blackberry he was able to link The Black Keys with a diverse group of hip-hop entertainers to produce an independent release that true hip-hop fans will appreciate. To go along with the music he was able to tie in Chevrolet who exclusively designed the "Blakroc" Camaro. This is another great business move by Mr. Dash that is helping a lot of talented people in the industry. You can tell he was setting this up all along but he had to get the people back on his side after releasing "The Jim Jones Story" which also was recieved well by hip-hop heads. I am looking forward to The Black Keys tour dates and hope that I can catch up with Dame "Backstage"!!!
What is BlakRoc?

BlakRoc is a collaboration between The Black Keys and some of the biggest names in hip hop, including; Mos Def, Q-Tip, RZA, Raekwon, Pharoahe Monch, Jim Jones, NOE, Nicole Wray and Billy Danze. The BlakRoc album was released on "Black Friday," November 27, 2009 (the day after Thanksgiving) (This "Blak Friday" collaborative was strictly sold via independent record stores and exclusive on iTunes digitally upon release.

Carl Black Chevrolet will be the world wide exclusive outlet to offer the official BlakRoc Chevy Camaro.

The 2010 Chevy Camaro speaks for itself with its sculptured body and passionate engineering that left nothing to be desired. Carl Black has simply added the sizzle to match the passion and creativity of the BlakRoc project.

From the ground up, the BlakRoc Camaro has been equipped with sleek, stylish accents that tie in with the BlakRoc brand. Starting with the BR logo inlayed front and center.

Blacking it out turns up the heat. The windows are tinted, the taillights are smoked, and even the Chevy bow tie goes dark to complete the look. The Black on Black classic combination subtly comes to life with flat black racing stripes front to back with the BlakRoc logo inlayed in metallic on the hood and rear spoiler.

Interior includes the BlakRoc logo embedded in custom design kick plates and black on black BR logo custom embroidered on center console.

The BlakRoc Chevy Camaro is now available for purchase.

Learn More at BlakRoc.com