General Motors celebrates marketing achievements with GEMAS Effies Awards wins

General Motors along with its agency partners Leo Burnett and Starcom, picked up the gold in the Best Youth Marketing category for Chevrolet's 'Aveo: Urban Challenge' campaign. 'Aveo: Totally Street' also picked up a silver in the Automotive category.

In an exemplary case of integrated effort between PR, advertising and media, GM's partners Memac Ogilvy Public Relations, Leo Burnett and Starcom clinched the bronze for Chevrolet's 'Buckle Up' Child safety seat campaign in the Best Use of CSR category.

General Motors also won the gold in the Automotive category and the biggest award of the evening, the Grand Prix, for ACDelco's "Yes" campaign, which was created by Memac Ogilvy and Mather.

Fadi Ghosn, Chief Marketing Officer, General Motors Middle East said:

"These awards reaffirm the dedication of our team and our communication and media partners to top marketing practices that are effective in delivering results. We will be applying similar level of marketing practices to our exciting new portfolio of award-winning products."

The 360-degree 'Yes' campaign focused on changing the misperceptions of ACDelco's after-market services across the retail and car owner target universe. By leveraging ACDelco's 'can do' brand attitude of All Makes, All Models, All Cars - the ' Yes' campaign supported wholesale dealers in re-positioning ACDelco.

The 'Aveo: Totally Street' campaign launched the Aveo compact sedan and the hatchback version. It tapped into the youth's need to express themselves via an interactive website where they could personalize their own car and during an activation at the "Chevrolet Urban Challenge" event. The youth were directly engaged and able to interact with a lineup of halo Chevrolet products in an environment geared towards them with live music, graffiti art, break dancers and sporting challenges.

The 'Buckle Up' Child seat safety campaign drove awareness at a public level to change parents' habits when buckling in their children and worked with governments and non-governmental organisations regionally to develop child safety legislation.

The inaugural GEMAS Effies MENA Awards are the fruit of a partnership between theGulf Marketing Effectiveness in Marketing Awards which were launched in 2004 by Gulf Marketing Review Magazine and Effies, a worldwide awards programme founded in New York in 1968 that rewards marketing effectiveness across the globe.