SaturnFans.com Links

The Saturn swan song for Publicis Groupe's Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, breaks Feb 12 during the Olympics on NBC for the launch of the GM brand's first sport utility vehicle.

Saturn Division, armed with fresh products, will try to reinvent itself this year as youthful and stylish with new advertising. After all, it hasn't been "A different kind of car company," its longtime slogan, for some time.

Saturn has a different kind of problem. The General Motors division, touted as "a different kind of company" since its 1990 debut, is readying its biggest new-product blitz since driving onto the scene as an import fighter. But Saturn, which is seeking an agency for the crucial fall 2002 launch of its Ion entry model, no longer looks so different.

Saturn, which built its image around customer care, introduces a new advertising tagline in a brand TV campaign breaking today. Saturn, part of General Motors, is replacing its current ad tagline "It's different in a Saturn" with "People First." The automaker decided to drop the tagline because it wanted to explain the "It's different" positioning in better detail, said Scott McLaren, advertising manager at the brand. "People understood it, but it lacked some definition."

Canadian graduate business schools were invited to develop a national marketing campaign to integrate Saturn's 3-Door Coupe into the university marketplace.

The different kind of car company could be getting a different advertising agency. Saturn is seeking creative proposals from five ad agencies for the launch of the Ion, the new small car set to replace Saturn's flagship S-series on the Spring Hill assembly line later this year. At stake could be an estimated $300 million-a-year ad account and a 14-year relationship that Saturn has with Publicis & Hal Riney, the agency that has handled its advertising since 1988.

Even though General Motors is reportedly slashing its 2006 advertising budget, Saturn's ad budget is set for a boost.

Camera- and computer-generated special effects are no longer just the stuff of Hollywood's big-budget action flicks. Such trickery has rapidly become a filmmaking staple in the ad world, too, in increasingly sophisticated form.

Saturn has awarded its entire estimated $300 million advertising account to Omnicom Group's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco. Goodby had been in the pitch for the anticipated $100 million-plus Ion launch next fall, but was awarded the entire account, executives familiar with the situation said.

The company will no longer tout itself as being "different" in its television and print ads.

GM's Saturn, the "different kind of car company," attempts in its latest commercial to humorously recall a different kind of era, when homophobia was more accepted.

From BusinessWeek.com: It wasn't an easy conclusion to reach for Eric Hirshberg, the chief creative officer of ad agency Deutsch, Los Angeles, who has been the guardian of Saturn advertising for the past 15 months. But he realized last fall that the sometimes schmaltzy small-town, almost Hallmark card personality that launched Saturn in the late 1980s finally had to go the way of Bob Dole's White House aspirations. "We researched the heck out of this, and we found that it's a dog that just doesn...

Shopping takes an unusual twist in a new Saturn full-line brand commercial that debuts February 23rd during the annual Grammy Awards broadcast on CBS.

The United Auto Workers and General Motors have been full partners in the planning and operation of the Saturn plant since the new division began. In this 31-minute video, assembly-line workers, union officers, and line managers tell how labor problems are handled at Saturn.