GM Repositions OnStar, Destructive Ocean Mining for EV Metals, X Is Born

July 24, 2023
Welcome to a freshly picked, fully organic week in the Retail Automotive industry. Today we’re on location at a Dealer-run charity golf tournament in Atlanta as we talk about GM’s repositioning of OnStar. We also talk about the less-than-stellar results of a study of ocean mining for EV battery materials, as well as the x-tinction of the Twitter bird.
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GM is launching a new advertising campaign to position its OnStar service, known for in-vehicle safety features such as roadside and crash assistance, will undergo a transformation, with a new advertising campaign aimed at highlighting its role in driving tech experiences in the GM's lineup.

  • "This campaign is our first attempt at really reintroducing that brand role for OnStar," said Laura Thornton, marketing director for GM's digital business and OnStar. "You'll see a new look, a new design, a new messaging strategy, a different way to talk about the products in this space."
  • The new campaign will replace OnStar's previous tagline, "Be Safe Out There," with "Better Never Stops." Silmo Bonomi, Chief Creative Officer at Campbell Ewald, the agency that worked on the campaign, the new tagline was inspired by the idea of continual improvement, like smartphone updates:


A new study has shown that the impact of deep-sea mining for EV battery metals is more destructive to marine ecosystems than previously estimated after a small mining operation off the coast of Japan led to a 43% drop in marine life density in directly affected areas and an even great 56% drop in adjacent areas

  • The study analyzed the seabed ecology following Japan's first successful extraction of cobalt crusts from deep-sea mountains, another method of mining EV battery metals, which also had significant impacts on marine life.
  • Ecologist Lisa Levin, has refuted claims from mining companies that deep-sea mining is less destructive than land mining and asserts that the impact of deep-sea mining extends to larger areas due to the nature of the underwater landscape.

It’s official, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Elon musk announce that the company he spend $44B to buy would be ditching to iconic name and blue bird to become “X”, the ‘everything platform’.

  • X.com was initially what Paypal was called when Musk founded it and he purchased x.com from the company back in 2017. X.com now redirects to twitter.com
  • Musk tweeted about the transition for hours, he even joined a Twitter Spaces session called “No one talk until we summon Elon Musk,”. He quietly sat in the room after joining for an hour before confirming the change would be happening and that they “were cutting the Twitter logo from the building with blowtorches.”
  • 3 months ago the company’s official name was changed to “X” and all official correspondence referenced the company as such.

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