General Motors Co. announced Tuesday it will streamline the way it buys advertising as it trims the number of companies it uses to place media buys.
On Wednesday, GM’s global chief marketing officer Joel Ewanick and global Chevrolet marketing chief Chris Perry held meetings with ad agencies on the review in New York. Ewanick headed to Brazil after his New York trip.<./p>
The Detroit automaker uses more than 20 media buying companies globally and is asking a few of them to bid on the work to “improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its global operations for purchased media,” GM said in a statement.
In an interview in Washington, DC on the sidelines of a Martin Luther King Memorial event, Perry said the company hopes to make a decision in the next few months.
“We’re hoping to get it done in the next several months. It’s a big endeavor and we’re going to take our time to make sure we do it right,” Perry said, noting that it will take additional months after a decision is made to complete the transition.
The request for proposal will be issued to several global media companies and include all consumer-related media channels: print, digital, broadcast, search engine optimization and social media.
Perry declined to say how much GM could save in spending as part of a streamlined approach. “It’s efficiencies and it is also being more effective in the dollars that we do spend,” Perry said.
GM is one of the world’s largest advertisers and was ranked third in the first three months of the year in the United States.
Creative agencies are not included in the review, GM said this week.
GM spent $542 million in the first three months of this year on advertising, up 1.3 percent, according to Kantar Media, a research group. The automaker said in its annual report it spent $5.1 billion worldwide on sales and marketing in 2010.
GM was the third leading spender on advertising behind Procter & Gamble and AT&T. The report said Chrysler Group LLC was seventh at $319 million, followed by Toyota Motor Corp. at $308 million and Ford Motor Co. at $299 million.
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