From Steve Dubansky, MD, SVP, Medical Director, Palio

Apparently, you can put lipstick on a pig yet still be punished for it!

I read with interest that the Cadillac division of General Motors changed its advertising agency for the second time in 5 months. What else would you expect? The economy remains severely troubled and Cadillac sales are down, so, just as happens in the pharmaceutical ad world when drug sales falter, the client frequently looks for a scapegoat. The client means business, and he’s not just horsing around. And there, somewhat sheepishly cowering in the corner, sensing it’s a lamb soon to led to slaughter, is the unfortunate ad agency. The Cadillac client spies the agency and says, “Agency of record for Cadillac, it’s all your fault. Now hit the road, and no pun intended.” But the Cadillac car is clearly the turkey here, and their brand team is just too chicken to admit it.

Okay. Enough of the faintly amusing and highly derivative puns. Simple story really. Poorly designed car with faltering sales in hard financial times. The agency couldn’t put lipstick on a pig, and so, like an old jalopy, they were kicked to the sidewalk. Imagine how surprised I was when simply out of curiosity I looked into Cadillac sales figures.

What! Total sales for June were up 39 percent versus the same month in 2009. Retail sales were up 35 percent. The Cadillac SRX crossover model saw its total sales rise 462 percent for its 10th straight month of triple-digit percentage increases. Its CTS sports sedan posted its best retail month of the year with total sales up 31 percent and retail sales up 23 percent.

So the agency wasn’t scapegoated at all. Quite the contrary. They had been part of a rather remarkable sales upturn. So why were they let go? Hard to know, but it’s indubitably related to the arrival at GM of a new marketing executive. Interesting to note that the new Cadillac agency, until last week the agency-of-record for Chrysler, when offered the Cadillac business, displayed their undying loyalty to Chrysler by dropping them in a heartbeat when offered a no doubt more lucrative Cadillac assignment. You can bet that the difference in fee is not  a poultry-sorry, I mean paltry- amount. Perhaps the new agency is trading loyalty for the Benjamins and being just a bit piggy.

So what have we learned. The advertising aphorism, “You can’t put lipstick on a pig,” and a corollary truth, “If you can’t put lipstick on a pig you’ll be scapegoated,” clearly don’t apply here. There’s a new agency in Cadillac town for reasons not to be found on a profit and loss sheet. Personality clashes? The agency not obsequious enough? Perhaps the agency had the temerity to say, “No” to something? One editorial mistake too many? One deadline missed by a day? As any of us who work in agencies knows well, there are many possible explanations why companies dismiss their agencies.

I don’t wish to duck the issue, but perhaps in this case it was nothing more than the new marketing guru wanting a new team of vendors. Kind of like a new baseball manager firing the old coaches and bringing in new coaches of his own choosing. The only difference? New baseball managers are usually hired to redirect underachieving teams. It appears that both Cadillac and its old agency can hardly be said to be underachieving.

There’s another baseball saying that’s worth remembering. It’s an almost universal truth: “Every manager knows that he takes the job only to be fired later.” Similarly, when a company farms out their promotional business to an ad agency, that agency must remember that beginning on day one, their time as agency-of-record is limited. The clock starts ticking. Fortunately for most of us,  it usually ticks longer than 5 months!