Greg did not renew his contract with Chyrsler/Eagle earlier this year (6/96). He sited conflicts with movie scheduling and his committment to Later as the reasons.
Comedian Greg Kinnear - the other Hoosier with his own late-night/early-morning TV talk show - is waking up consumers with his performance as an Eagle spokesman. Kinnear, who, like David Letterman, hails from Indiana, appears in a series of humorous ads that have been running for about a year for Eagle's Talon and Vision models. In the ads created by Bozell Worldwide's Detroit office, Kinnear gets people to test drive an Eagle.
About half of the 1,004 consumers polled for Ad Track said they hadn't seen the ads. One reason, Eagle's David Rooney says, is that Chrysler bought commercial time on TV shows that reach higher-income audiences. Only 17% of respondents earning less than $7,500 a year had seen the ads three times or more, vs. more than one-third of those earning $35,000 or more.
The ads appear to be working. Sales of the Vision were up 49% to 22,594 between October 1994 and this past June. Sales of the Talon remained even at 18,640. The good news for Eagle is that 60% of the 316 people who had seen the ads three times or more said they liked them and 75% found them effective. Kelly Hand, a homemaker in Charlotte, N.C., says Kinnear "has a casual appeal. The ads are not as heavy-handed as other car ads."
White consumers most familiar with the ads responded more favorably to them than blacks or Hispanics did. While 6% of whites said they disliked the ads, 18% of blacks who'd seen the ads three times or more gave them a thumbs down, as did 16% of Hispanic respondents.
Copyright 1995, USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co., Inc. ODottie Enrico, EAGLE ADS GET SOARING MARKS FROM VIEWERS, USA TODAY, 07-09-1995.