Hyundai's Former Marketing Guru Leads GM to Recommit to Black Ad Agencies

For years GM has been at the forefront of working with the minority community, specifically the African American community as a number of automakers have straddled the fence, hiring general market agencies to handle their African American ad accounts, while retaining or recruiting Hispanic agencies to handle their community.

Since Mike Jackson, once GM's top marketing guy, who happened to be an African American, left the company several years ago, many critics believed the automaker made a number of missteps as it related to selecting an ad agency. After having Carol H.Williams Agency as being the African American agency of record for many of their brands for years, the agency's role was virtually diminished and replaced for a short-tenure by a general market agency and Sanders-Wingo, another African American-owned agency. Unlike Carol H.Williams Agency, who was once the number one ad agency on Black Enterprise magazine annual ranking of businesses and was responsible for handling a number of GM's brands at the time, Sanders-Wingo was only assigned the Chevy account.

Chevy's all-new world-class 2011 Cruze is pictured, replacing the aging Cobalt.

Moreover, after GM emerged from bankruptcy last year and after going through another round of senior-level marketing changes, the automaker decided to assign the African American account to their general market ad agency. Ironically, since tax payers owned a significant share of the automaker, this just wasn't a smart decision by the senior marketing executive. Obviously, there was an uproar from within the community and more changes were soon to follow.

With another shift in the top marketing chair, GM lured Hyundai's top marketing guru earlier this summer, Joel Ewanick. Ewanick was responsible for Hyundai's recession-proof ads that paid consumer payments for up to six months in case of a job loss. Now as far as we know, Hyundai has never had an African American agency on record. So it came as a surprise last week, when it was announced that two African American-owned ad agencies were being hired by America's number new-vehicle sales automaker, Carol H. Williams Agency and Spike DDB. Carol H. Williams Agency would again be apart of the GM family, developing creatives targeting the African American community. In the past, Cadillac's African American account was worth about $25 to $30 million, according to Nielsen.

Cadillac's all-new edgy-looking CTS coupe is the premium brand's first two-door coupe since the disappearance of the Eldorado.

This time around the woman-owned agency would now be responsible for the Cadillac account, while Spike DDB, owned by film maker Spike Lee, would run Chevy's African America account, which bills approximately $30 to $40 million annually. As of now, there's no word on who'll oversee the Buick-GMC account. Just wondering: will GM ever give an African American agency control of handling their general account as we've seen with Jeep and their black-owned agency? At this point, we're glad GM's back on cue, showing their re-commitment to diversity. Could GM lead the trend for automakers to truly diversify and adequately allocate funding to all groups - unlike what we saw in the past three years?