From 'General Motors believes' to 'I'm seeing some good signs'
General Motors isn't my father's communication client.
My dad, Thomas Murray, did advertising for GM in the 1950s and 1960s, and I grew up hearing his stories about the stodgy executives"old fools in high stools," he often called themwhose idea of a good ad headline was "The Car of Tomorrow Today."
So I chuckled when I heard some hipster at GM had convinced vice chairman Bob Lutz to start a blog.
And I laughed even harder when I read the tone of a Lutz post from late April, after GM issued some ugly earnings reports.
Lutz wrote in his blog on April 19: "Every so often, we all have to do a bit of a sense check, just to make sure that the sun will indeed rise tomorrow. And, amidst all of the gloom and doom surrounding GM lately, I'd like to give yet another alternative viewpoint. No, it's not all bad; indeed, I'm seeing some good signs. "
And he went breezily on to list some signs of life at the troubled company.
A couple days after reading that and trying to imagine what the "old fools in the high stools," would say about Lutz's blog. Then I opened the May issue of Car Collector Magazine. Regular columnist Thomas Murray was writing about the difficulty of doing human advertising for GM:
the GM corporate account was not run by people with advertising or marketing credentials as it is today. It was mostly overseen by reassigned sales or PR people who wrote speeches for the top executives, trying to anticipate exploratory [advertising] projects from overheard conversations, and memorized the rules and shibboleths of the impersonal GM stylebook, likely established in the days when only a serious tone in corporate communication seemed to reflect quality of product. Thus, if an agency writer would mistakenly try to breathe life into a GM ad by saying something that suggested there were human beings behind the GM logo, even something as personal as 'At GM we believe ' the wise old veteran would quickly change it to read, 'General Motors believes ' while issuing a strong reprimand and a reminder of the rules.
GM may be in financial trouble these days. But I think my dad will agree: Its communication is better than it ever was.
