New York Times 
10:38 a.m. | Updated In a match between medium and message, the Cadillac division of General Motors will use the world’s premier athletic competition to show off the 2013 Cadillac ATS, its new entry-level sedan, in venues around the world.
Commercials for the ATS, dubbed the baby Cadillac, will appear on July 27 during the NBC coverage of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. There will also be commercials in movie theaters. Video clips will be online, beginning on Wednesday, on Web sites like YouTube as well as on cadillac.com/ats.
The clips and commercials are part of a campaign that carries the theme “Cadillac ATS vs. the world” and takes the car to Chile, China, Monaco and Morocco. The locations were chosen to put the ATS through some eye-popping paces, among them the Guoliang Tunnel Road in China and the Monaco Grand Prix course.
The range of countries featured in the campaign also reflects plans by Cadillac to sell the ATS overseas, starting next year, as well as in North America, where it goes on sale in late August or early September. “The ATS is a fundamental building block in building Cadillac as a global brand,” said Joel Ewanick, global chief marketing officer at General Motors.
The campaign is being created by Fallon Worldwide in Minneapolis, part of the Publicis Groupe.
Cadillac will be one of only three automotive brands to advertise during NBC’s Olympic coverage, Mr. Ewanick said, along with Chevrolet, another General Motors brand, and BMW.
General Motors has also bought commercial time for the Chevrolet and Cadillac spots on stations owned and operated by NBC, he added, and will be “the only auto sponsor on all the live streaming” of Olympic coverage that NBC plans online.
BMW’s presence during the NBC coverage will be intriguing because one of the cars Cadillac intends the ATS to compete with is the BMW 3 Series. Others include the Audi A4, the Infiniti G35 and the Mercedes-Benz C Class.
The competition in the category represents “an exceedingly difficult crowd to break into,” said Molly Peck, director for advertising and sales promotion at Cadillac. The category is composed of the babies among the luxury car brand lineups, in that the models are usually the smallest for each nameplate and are priced lower than their larger counterparts.
For that reason, the buyers are “often young, entering luxury for the first time,” Ms. Peck said, and “it’s strategically important for us to get these buyers into Cadillac.”
The best way to do that is to talk about the car being “fun to drive,” she said, but added that this is “exceedingly hard to convey.”
The campaign will seek to deliver that message by taking a more casual, less formal approach than has been traditional for the Cadillac brand.
For instance, the commercials and videos feature Ross Thomas, a 30-year-old actor and filmmaker, and Derek Hill, the son of the race car driver Phil Hill.
Mr. Hill drives the ATS in the challenging locations and Mr. Thomas, in the passenger seat, describes the feats to viewers, taking the place of the kind of voiceover narrator usually heard in luxury car commercials.
And the music heard in the spots is “Phenomena” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Such steps signal that the ATS is “something different,” Ms. Peck said.
The starting price of the ATS is $33,990, including freight, about $1,800 less than the base price of the 2012 BMW 328i. The ATS will be at the base of the Cadillac pyramid, below models like the CTS and XTS.
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