Motor City’s Detroit News’ Autos Insider provides decent coverage of the automotive industry. Recently they ran a couple of pieces on hip hop artists’ involvement with auto marketing.
Although Chrysler has been focusing marketing for their new Charger sedan on the “Nascar crowd”, they’re also benefiting from requests from rappers to use Chargers in hip hop music videos and related promos for their music.
So far, Sean Paul had a Charger in the video for We Be Burnin, the Ying Yang Twins use one in a TV ad for their new album, both Twista and Mike Jones displayed their Chargers on MTV’s Cribs and Mike Jones is also said to appear with his on the cover of the August issue of Dub. Apparently other rappers have also included the Charger in videos without explicit permission and even more are asking for Chargers for future videos.
This interest follows an earlier well publicized request from 50 Cent who got the first 2006 Dodge Charger as well as a voicemail message from Snoop Dogg regarding an earlier 300C that Chrysler CEO Dieter Zetsche made great use of.
This seems to be another case of a company having hip hop marketing opportunities fall in their lap. Which makes me wonder, does that make the Charger look cooler because they don’t appear to be seeking out the endorsements? Does that makes them look clueless for not developing a hip hop related strategy? Or is this the kind of secret campaign Russell Simmons said McDonalds needed to conduct?
I’d probably go mostly with 1 at the moment because it is a great looking sedan and I think a behind the scenes campaign would have been leaked by now. And maybe they keep the Nascar crowd happy if they don’t look like they’re marketing to hip hop fans. Just thinking out loud here. In any case, they’re responding positively to the attention rather than taking the begrudging stance preferred by Hilfiger and Timberland when the hip hop crowd first picked up on their products, so they’re definitely not clueless.
