• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, January 20, 2004

I suspect that when Robert Lutz--GM vice chairman of product development and chairman of GM No. America--was growing up, he was often the last kid chosen when neighborhood ball teams picked their players. Or he was endlessly rejected for dates in high school. Or maybe he played the tuba while everyone else was skateboarding. Whatever happened, he has developed a nasty passive/aggressive personality that he recently unleashed on the magazine industry in a recent trade magazine commentary.

While he praises magazines for having a "real impact" with "precisely tailored and well-developed message(s)" offering "style, layout, and time" to help GM deliver its ad messages, at the same time he threatens the industry because he thinks magazines don't give domestic automakers an editorial fair shake.

He doesn't like being lumped in with Ford and Chrysler as one of the "Big 3" U.S. automakers, and he says that magazines perpetuate a dated impression that domestic cars are not as good as imports. When GM products are considered separately (vs. being just another "domestic" auto company) they stack up well against imports, he writes, citing--humorously enough--a magazine story that gave high marks to a GM model.

What Mr. Lutz has done by discussing GM's advertising in magazines on the same page that he expresses unhappiness with the nature of GM coverage in magazines is to threaten the industry in a boorish and ineffective way. (Not that other companies don't try his lame-brained tactic all the time.)

Let's pump a little reality into the arrogant atmosphere that Mr. Lutz breathes:

1. The media did not create GM's woe. Crappy cars and service did. The media, although it undeniably has an influence on what people perceive as newsworthy, more often reflects public opinion than creates it. Reporters talk to consumers who tell them that GM cars suck compared to imports. Reporters test drive your cars and the imports you compete with and write of their experiences. That's your problem, not the media's. When you try to make it the magazine's industry's problem, that is just wrong. Newspapers and TV news have also reflected public opinion that GM cars are not as good as most of the imports they compete with. Are you readying similar opinions for Editor & Publisher and Variety? The Web is going to pose a whole new problem as unhappy GM customers relate their experiences to the world. How are you going to bribe them?

2. The reason magazines effectively deliver your ad messages is because they have credibility with their audiences. If they editorially sucked up to GM as you wish, that credibility would erode and readers would abandon magazines they suspect of kowtowing to the mighty GM ad dollar. You can only have a free and objective press if they have the economic strength to resist pressure from guys like you. As a major magazine ad space buyer you threaten not only the relationship with the reader, but the very economic underpinnings that allow magazines to be the ad vehicles you so transparently praise.

I spent 13 years at Newsweek watching guys like you try to put the screws to editors whenever they didn't like what appeared in the magazine. Lots of them pulled their ads, thinking the pain would produce "editorial awareness." It had the opposite effect. The ad guys suffered; the editors shook it off and kept doing their jobs. In the end, most of the advertisers came back into the magazine because they realized they were only hurting themselves by NOT having an ad presence in the book--especially when they were in a highly competitive industry, uh, like automotive.

I think you picked on magazines because you know they are vulnerable. That's the way most bullies operate, isn't it? Hit guys when they are down? The slow economy has been harsh on the magazine industry, and the competitive pressures to maintain or gain market share in the auto category have been intense. Some magazines have probably proposed ideas that would soften, if not remove, every brick in the wall between Church and State. These books are to be pitied, for they compromise their future for a short-term gain.

Mr. Lutz, you ask an entire industry to compromise its future for the sake of GM advertising. I can only hope they ignore you.