GM to move Cadillac brand to New York City

[Huggybear]

In a desperate attempt to resurrect the brand's imagine, Cadillac is moving their advertising from Campbell Ewald to Publicist and relocating to NYC in order to survive in the luxury market segment. Cadillac will enjoy access to some of the most talented and creative people in the world while becoming immersed and influenced by the culture of a world class city. It will also gain a broader reach due to Publicist's international perspective as a Paris based company. The brand is dying after years of appealing strictly to a white, middle class customer base. It is finally getting the product mix overhauled to emphasize style and performance and distancing itself from the other GM brands. It needs an agency with broad intellectual and creative skill. It could never get that from a bunch of white bred yahoos at a firm from 12 mile and Van Dyke in Warren. Surprisingly, most of the world doesn't think a person with a U of M or Michigan State degree, who considers Tiger games cultural events and believes being well traveled means taking their kids to Disney World is sophisticated and worldly enough to create campaigns and brand messaging needed for success.

I assume that this is a parody of Mr. De Nysschen's party line, which explanation for the move to New York was insanely tone deaf. If that is the case, you can stop reading right here. I saw the humor in it even if others did not. Bravo!

BUT — if you are being serious about starting a condescension contest,

• It is "image," not "imagine;"
• "Cadillac" is a singular noun;
• It is "Lowe Campbell Ewald," not "Campbell Ewald;"
• "Immersed" takes the preposition "in;"
• It is "Publicis," not "Publicist;"
• Compound adjectives such as "middle-class," "Paris-based," and "white-bred" are hyphenated. In addition, please note the spelling of "white-bread;" the correct spelling references a food;
• It is not clear who is overhauling the product mix;
• A person takes "his" children to Disney world, not "their" children; and
• You missed the comma at the end of the appositive ending with "Disney World."

If you are a native English speaker, it is ironic [[in the situational sense) that someone who writes so carelessly would venture to call anyone a yahoo. I do give you points for not inserting an apostrophe into any plural form. Of course, this too might be a parody — just one that is too subtle for its intended audience.

Getting to the substance, you make some factual suppositions that seem a bit out of line with reality. When you write that "most of the world" looks down on yahoos from Warren, I would observe, as someone who has been around the world, that most people in the world are unsophisticated hillbillies who have no clue what Warren even is. The only thing that prevents average Americans from understanding that they are not alone in their ignorance is that they assume that if someone does not walk or talk like a Jerry Springer guest, such a person is sophisticated. This is exactly what Tom Wolfe wrote about when he lampooned some early adopters of modernism as worshipping "the white gods."

The attack on the "yahoos" also seems to misapprehend the realities that [[1) most people working organizations that make, import, or sell cars in the United States are not particularly cultured - they are just as average in that regard as the people in Detroit whom you deride and that [[2) all of those other companies aggressively recruit people from GM. Ford, and Chrysler.

If I had to point to one thing that has inhibited Cadillac's success, it is the fact that many luxury buyers are self-loathing Americans. What else could explain the popularity of the base-model BMW 3-series?

HB