Filed under: Marketing/Advertising, Chrysler, Fiat
In-flight wireless Internet access and e-mail is both a boon and a curse to
Chrysler chief marketing officer Olivier Francois, who says he already works 20 hours a day running marketing for both Chrysler, as well as five of Fiat's brands. His frequent flight time was his last refuge to write and think through other work on the nine brands he manages without endless meetings or putting out fires.
And his email can be intriguing. On Nov. 11, he was flying Delta from Detroit to San Francisco. In flight, he received an email from Burmese Foreign Minister Nyan Win advising him that Burmese pro-Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi would soon be released from prison in part, read the email, because of the public pressure Fiat had generated through an ad in Europe last year that went viral spotlighting her imprisonment.
Good news, to be sure. But the email meant that Olivier spent the rest of the flight dictating edits by email from 35,000 feet on another ad he ad he commissioned for the cause, shot in Hiroshima, Japan at the 11th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates only days before with the Dalai Lama climbing out of a
Chrysler 300 (the 300 is not in evidence, but he shot it in case he wants to run the ad in the U.S.) The new ad, featuring
Lancia vehicles, which broke this week on European TV and the Internet, had to be changed to celebrate the political dissident's release (watch it after the jump).
Francois, a self-assured French-born executive whose job is running Fiat's marketing, Chrysler's marketing, as well as serving as CEO of all aspects of the Chrysler and Lancia business as CEO of those brands, appears supremely confident in every thing he touches. And that encompasses a lot: from selecting ad agencies - six in the last year - to actually writing ad copy, composing music for ads and chasing down celebrities he wants photographed next to his cars.
But there is one brand task that Olivier admits is starting to get the better of him: fixing the Chrysler brand messaging. "It is a wonderful brand with great American roots, but finding the idea to reintroduce it...very difficult," says Olivier.
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Continue reading Chrysler's Francois has a lot of answers for brands, but not yet for Chrysler
Chrysler's Francois has a lot of answers for brands, but not yet for Chrysler originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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19-11-2010, 03:40 AM
