Chrysler Is Spending Some $35 Million To Launch Its 2009 Dodge Journey Crossover Auto, But If Newspapers Are Lucky They May See Around $1 million Of That Spend

Philip Stone April 10, 2008

Detroit just doesn’t love newspapers any more. But it likes the Internet a whole lot.

Car makers launching new models are increasingly putting more and more of their spend into digital platforms and newspapers are getting less and less. So it’s not just the auto classifieds that are disappearing, but the big newspaper display ads to introduce new models are becoming endangered species, except for papers like the Wall Street Journal.

The problem is that car makers are not really increasing their annual marketing spend, they’re just spreading the money around in more and more ways, and newspapers and radio in particular are really losing out.

Take the Dodge Journey Crossover launch that kicks off this week. The budget is about $35 million – the same as the company spent last year in launching the Dodge Nitro. But this year Dodge is allocating 29% of its launch budget on interactive media which is the biggest digital spend the company has ever made whether measured in dollars spent or the percentage of the budget allocated.

Chrysler Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Meyer says that just two years ago only about 5% of a marketing launch budget was dedicated toward online. The reason the company likes online is that it gets so much direct feedback from web consumers -- it says it has already made 400 changes to 2008 and 2009 models based on customer web feedback.

The biggest proportion of the launch spend is still television at 54%, then digital with 29% and that just leaves 17% to be split between print at 9% (most of that goes to magazines, not newspapers), there’s a special move theater promotion that gets close to 5% and then there’s 4% for radio aimed mostly at the Hispanic and African-American shopper.

And apart from all of the traditional and digital advertising, the marketing folks have signed the brand up to become a sponsor of the US Soccer Federation and will be the official car for the men’s and women’s national soccer teams.

Chrysler is not alone in bypassing newspapers for the most part. The Toyota Tundra is made at a plant in San Antonio, Texas, and Toyota wants to boost sales in the southeastern US so the San Antonio Express-News gushes about how the Toyota is launching a television and radio campaign to boost sales, in a campaign that features some of the San Antonio plant’s workers.

The newspaper notes that Texas is the largest US market for pickup trucks with 11 of the country’s top-selling dealerships in Texas, including one in San Antonio. The newspaper quotes Don Jackson, senior vice president of quality and production at the San Antonio plant, saying, “When I see my team shown on TV doing what they do best, I fell I have a brand new baby again.”

But not one word that the “team” won’t be showing up in ads in the Tundra’s home town newspapers!

And then there’s Volkswagen that is launching a new campaign this month featuring “Das Auto (the car). Das Auto is Max, a talking 1964 black beetle (no matter how Volkswagen designs cars they will always be known to the older generation as the maker of The Beetle). The idea of the campaign is that Max not only talks, he listens, too, and that Volkswagen understands and responds to what people want. But again the campaign is limited to TV and the Internet.

And let’s not forget Porsche is promoting its Boxster and Cayman sports cars this month. The campaign is using magazine ads, online banners, and micro sites. The company says that going into 2009 interactive and magazines will continue to be its focus. “Online is a big part of Porsche going forward,” said Marshall Ross, the chief creative officer of the Cramer-Krasselt agency developing the campaign. “If we can bring that personality online in a compelling way, you will see a lot more of it.”

Responding to an earlier story about why car makers and dealers are flocking to the Internet and almost giving up on newspapers, a reader emailed to explain why a big dealership in the Washington D.C. area relies so much on the Internet for its marketing. The bottom line is that dealer can issue a lot more information on his web site than he can in a newspaper advertisement.

“Their model is relatively simple. When you go to the dealer website you can search by make and model of car. Then up comes a full description of every car in that category that they have in their inventory; its features and the fully delivered Internet price, and it also provides the dealership location of that vehicle.

“The Internet price is typically $400 - $1,000 less than the price someone would get if they came into their showroom so there is this built-in incentive to shop the Internet. They do not haggle over price. This type of sales approach gives them much more visibility to their customers, plus decreases the amount of time they need to spend with each customer who comes into the showroom, ‘just shopping’. And it allows people to compare “apples to apples” and on price.”

The dealership does use TV to drive traffic not just to the car lot but to the web site, but print is used only for used cars. The dealership’s view   -- “the auto manufacturers will do all the ‘bells and whistles’ promotion. The dealership’s job is to sell the cars.”

There’s an old saying that the people advertisers want to attract from their newspaper spend are not readers, but rather buyers. But there seems to be a view in auto marketing departments that the buyers are on the Internet or are reading Forbes and Business Week, but not newspapers.