What is Cadillac doing?

Bumping rap songs in commercials and mixing old-school product placement on a hit-or-miss television show reboot featuring aging Hollywood stars is a gutsy marketing strategy. I will give Cadillac that.

For a brand with half of its customers over the age of 56, is that the kind of game plan that will bring Cadillac back to life? The verdict is still out.

With Tori Spelling and Jenny Garth as executive producers, FOX is fighting to bring Beverly Hills: 90210 back into the spotlight nearly 20 years after the hit teenage drama wrapped its tenth season. While they were able to bring back the entire original cast for the reboot, creatively labeled just as BH90210, they also added a new member to the family: Gabrielle Carter, aka, Andrea Zuckerman’s Crystal White Cadillac XT6.

Episode 5 of the 90’s revival introduced the XT6, a three-row SUV with a starting price above $53,000, with copious amounts of screen time when the Beverly Hills High School’s most notorious students set out to find the stalker who set fire to their set. They pile into the seven-passenger sport utility with Tori Spelling napping in the back, only to awake proclaiming “it’s so easy to [sleep] when there’s so much space in the third row” and lots of paused camera pans for the rear XT6 badging. Following the scene, the show cuts to commercial, a strategically placed Cadillac XT6 “Crew Ready” television spot.

The marketing message is clear: The new-for-2020 XT6 is perfect for moving around large groups of middle-aged “crews,” a term I’m not even sure is used by anyone in that customer segment to refer to their group of friends. There seems to be a disconnect between where Cadillac wants to go (younger, aspirational buyers looking for luxury vehicles to move their family and friends around) and how they’re getting there. Does television paid-placement even work anymore? With the advent of DVRs, we know that fewer people than ever watch commercials. In the age of social media and influencer marketing, giving the cast a fleet of Cadillac vehicles to drive around on Instagram in front of their collective 5.5 million followers seems like a better, and likely cheaper, alternative to paid product placement.

Earlier this year, there was quite a bit of talk about both Cadillac and GM’s overall marketing strategy and how it would move forward under the direction of newly appointed global Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl. A self-proclaimed creative brand revitalizer and the first person to hold the global CMO position in more than six years, Wahl stepped into a role overlooking the strategies for keeping aging brands like Cadillac and Buick alive and relevant. Judging by GM’s most recent quarterly sales numbers, released at the end of June, Buick seems to be adjusting well in the sport utility and crossover space. With so much change happening in Cadillac’s overall lineup at the moment, their successes remain to be seen.

A few questions remain, but one that begs to be asked is: Do hip-hop tracks, “cool kid” slang and 90’s television revivals sell vehicles? We’ll find out.