Many brands are respectfully coming forward with various kinds of support for the victims of the Boston bombings last week and for Beantown itself. And then there's Mercedes-Benz, whose products played a singular role in actually bringing the crime and terror spree to its end.

"It's a great feeling to have been able to assist with that," Mercedes-Benz spokeswoman Donna Boland told brandchannel.

It was common knowledge that the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly had carjacked a Mercedes-Benz ML 350, taking its owner on a rambling journey around the Boston area on the night of April 18—a trek that ended up in the death of one brother and the capture of the other that same night in Watertown, Mass.Continue reading...

From the Detroit auto show in a working person's town in January to the high-end distractions of this week's Geneva auto show, the focus of the auto industry next moves to an annual exhibition whose personality lands somewhere in between those two: the New York International Auto Show.

Scheduled for the Jacob Javits Center in New York from March 29 through April 27, with a press preview beforehand, the New York show mixes the glitz and accessibility of the world's most important media market with the fact that the event is a big and relied-upon marketing boost for Tri-State auto dealers just before the heavy annual selling season begins.Continue reading...

The electrified-vehicle business is bristling with news these days: General Motors said that it will begin production of a new Cadillac ELR plug-in hybrid by late next year, for instance. And Toyota has just begun bringing its new Scion iQ EV to the U.S., initially for car-sharing programs.

But by far the biggest news is a body blow to the fledgling industry: A123 Systems, one of the largest makers of batteries specifically for EVs and hybrids — and personally touted by President Obama as an exemplar of his "green jobs" policies — has filed for bankruptcy. Johnson Controls, a conventional-battery giant and growing manufacturer of batteries for electrified vehicles as well, wants to buy pieces of the expected carcass.

Mildly encouraged by greater traction for the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in or "extended-range" hybrid that can run on a gasoline engine as well as in all-electric mode, GM said it will build the new Caddy in the same Detroit plant where Volt is assembled, and with a similar powertrain. When it goes on sale, ELR will be the first electric luxury coupe with an extended range, GM North America President Mark Reuss said.Continue reading...

General Motors' marketing has drawn a lot of attention lately. But everyone in the car business knows it's actually new products that make the big differences in sales and market share: The more and the better vehicle launches, the bigger bumps a brand gets in all the important metrics. Nothing else an automaker can do even comes close.

That's one reason savvy GMers are looking hopefully past all the company's recent marketing kerfuffles to some promising new developments in sheetmetal: the introduction of the acclaimed new Cadillac ATS, for instance, and how GM reportedly is developing a new small-car platform that will boost efficiencies worldwide.

GM is hoping that the new ATS finally will establish Cadillac as a legitimate contender in the global luxury-car market, a gee-whiz compact luxury sport sedan that underscores the company's recovery from the dark days and bailout of 2009. Cadillac has been hyping the model all year, including substantial advertising during the London Summer Olympics on TV. The first shipments of ATS are expected on U.S. dealer lots over the coming week.Continue reading...

Realtime social analytics provider Topsy has just made Topsy Pro Analytics broadly available. Targeting marketers and journalists, Topsy Pro -- the world’s only index of the public social web -- is Topsy’s free service on steroids, offering a more granular breakdown of data, historical context, and a snapshot of the most influential tweets and tweeters.

Five-year-old Topsy Labs, one of a handful of companies with access to Twitter’s data stream, has refined their index to analyze multi-year access to information from millions of socially active websites and hundreds of billions of public tweets.

Topsy is on top of a burgeoning market for brands using social media measurement to assess the success of their messaging, and make quick course corrections. Their big data project dubbed Twindex, as Brandchannel has reported, is unprecedented in its reach. “Its scale of the data that makes this project so powerful," notes BuzzFeed's Matt Buchanan. "With Topsy's access to the full Twitter firehose, it's processing 400 million tweets a day in real-time. To compare, on Election Day 2008, there were 1.8 million tweets. There are that many tweets every six minutes today.” Continue reading...

Suddenly, Joel Ewanick is done knocking over all of the furniture in General Motors' marketing world — because he's gone. The company's strong-headed global CMO proved to be only a shooting star after GM ousted Ewanick (technically, he resigned, as GM tersely stated) over the weekend following a drama-filled two-year stint.

GM surprised Detroit, Madison Avenue and Wall Street by announcing on Sunday that Ewanick had "failed to meet expectations the company has for its employees" and elected to resign. Outlets including Ad Age and the Wall Street Journal reported that the trigger for Ewanick's sacking was that he failed to properly vet the financial details of Chevy's five-year deal with the iconic Manchester United soccer franchise, which was announced six weeks ago in a high-profile partnership that encompassed China, an international commitment to football and, somehow, Sting.

Today, Man United and Chevy detailed the jersey branding part of the deal, with GM's North American VP Alan Batey quoted instead of Ewanick. Ewanick has shed little additional light on what led to his abrupt exit, although he did tweet that it "has been a privilege & honor to work with the GM Team," and then tweeted the link to the Wall Street Journal report on his exit.Continue reading...

Volkswagen acquires remaining Porsche stake for nearly $6 billion.

Aetna and California doctors face off over business practices.

Barclays former CEO apologizes in grilling by U.K. lawmakers.

Alibaba clamps down on staff corruption.

Avon introduces his and her fragrances with Jon Bon Jovi's help.

BBC names new director general.

Best Buy makes its stores look sleeker.

Boeing plans new green technologies.Continue reading...

Two months after pulling its paid ads from Facebook, General Motors is "in talks" to return to the site as a paid advertiser in return for access to "better data," according to the Wall Street Journal (which broke the original story of the pull-out on May 15th). GM CEO Dan Akerson and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have spoken about the issues — GM's desire for better measurement and analytics to gauge the effectiveness of any paid Facebook advertising — that led to the falling out, WSJ reports.

GM's chief marketing officer Joel Ewanick and Facebook's global ad sales head Carolyn Everson reportedly met for the first time at the recent Cannes advertising festival to discuss what would bring the automaker back to the table, the Journal heard from a source. At that meeting, "Everson said Facebook is willing to provide GM with better data on how their ads can turn into dollars, as it has agreed to do with other advertisers, this person said. Facebook won't provide any special treatment for GM, however."

Whether or not GM can take credit for getting Facebook to improve its metrics and reporting (or receives any "special treatment," cheaper ad rates or additional data), it's certainly good news for other marketers feeling a similar need for more granular data in the never-ending quest to "prove" the ROI of paid Facebook advertising.Continue reading...