• by Karl Greenberg , January 31, 2011

I met Joel Ewanick, now global marketing chief at GM, and Chris Perry who now oversees the automaker's four brands in the U.S. at the Hilton on 42nd Street in NYC this morning. They are in town to reveal their Super Bowl ad buy. But I got the chance to talk to Ewanick about his new role. More on that later this week.

Ewanick and Perry have brought a strategy they used at Hyundai Motor Americica -- owning big broadcast events -- to Detroit. Chevrolet is going to all but own the Super Bowl automotive sector this year with at least six TV spots. Perry, who was most recently divisional chief of Chevrolet, and has now become U.S. market marketing leader for all for GM brands says the new ads are a distinct effort to get the focus on Chevrolet products like Cruze, Volt, Silverado and Camaro, where last fall the effort was on establishing the new "Chevy Runs Deep" brand identity.

The new ads are humorous but not over the top and almost all of them are designed to encase a central "I didn't know that" fact about the vehicles, particularly where Volt and the new Cruze Eco are concerned. One spot for the Volt, for example, trumpets the fact that you can charge the car's electric motor via any three-prong outlet for a dollar and change. The ad for Cruze Eco is a kind of meta commercial where a group of elderly -- and hard of hearing -- men and women are watching a TV spot for the Cruze Eco, but misunderstand that the vehicle can get 42 mpg. Thus, the pertinent facts are repeated, humorously throughout the spot.

The ad for Silverado shows the vehicle as "everyday hero" as Ewanick puts it, by having the owner use it to extricate his son from ever more ludicrous situations: a well, a cave, the belly of a whale, a volcano. "I didn't even know this town HAD a volcano," the guy says as he drives off in his Silverado to save his kid from the mountain, erupting in the background.

And a spot for Camaro, teasing the vehicle's role in the third Transformers movie, actually masquerades as precisely the kind of ad automaker's hate: a tacky tier III "buy one get two free" type dealer spot. In the ad the dealer promotes a big Camaro sale at his store by having a guy in a costume try to bash the hood of a Camaro with a mallet. Suddenly the vehicle comes to life as the Transformer from the toy and movie franchise, grabs the guy and hurls him over the dealership.

And there is going to be a big surprise in the post game show, but Perry and Ewanick won't tell me what it is, even though I tried to bribe them.