• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, September 12, 2007

CBS and the new Cadillac CTS are teaming up together for a big fall campaign, looking for big audiences to influence. Rev your marketing engines.

Good news for Cadillac: It'll have lots of CBS Monday night comedies, where some powerful media dollars - maybe $10 million, maybe $15 million or more -- can get to all those 25- to 54-year-old viewers. Good news for CBS: It'll get all those on- and off-air media dollars in the hope of getting more of those viewers.

But are they are the right viewers? Has CBS given up on getting those 18-49 or even 18-34 viewers? Cadillac -- except for the SUV models -- still doesn't seem to be the brand of the MTV set.

That might not be the point. Cadillac wants to hit lots of viewers -- and as George Schweitzer, president of the CBS Marketing Group, told The New York Times, "Our philosophy is to push our product out to as many eyeballs as we can."

That's always been the aim of the "everyman" network -- not just the always looming and pressing 18-49 viewers that marketers and other networks talk about. And who knows? Perhaps one day advertisers and networks will claim the 24-54 demo is really as valuable as CBS has always said it is.

According to CBS, it's the first time the network is giving over the launch of Monday night to just one advertiser.

What does that mean? That networks can now uniquely be identified with one such network? Hardly. Cadillac commercials will no doubt run on other TV programmers.

But perhaps it sends a signal that someday dollars could exclusively reside on just one media platform, one network, to get the greatest impact. A number of marketers -- with much smaller budgets than Cadillac -- have done exclusive deals with just one cable network and its associated partners and digital platforms.

Maybe there's some of that new-fangled behavioral targeting over at CBS we don't know about.

CBS and Cadillac will drive this one around the block and see.

advertisement

advertisement