BEHIND THE FEEL: OLIVIER FRAN‚OIS
From casting Charlie Sheen and Eminem to learning his people skills from Sergio Marchionne, an audience with the intuitively maverick Chief Marketing Officer at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles proves to be a highly entertaining trip.
Glancing down at his mobile, he saw it was Charlie Sheen calling from Los Angeles where he was under house arrest for speeding and dangerous driving. Sheen was an incurable repeat offender. And incurably unrepentant.The man adored Sheen – although the same wasn’t necessarily true of his boss, who was sitting in front of him in his office at Mirafiori in Turin.
The phone rang once, twice, five times. “Answer it, if you want,” Sergio Marchionne told him that morning six years ago, with a smile that was seen so rarely in public but so frequently in private. Olivier François – now head of the Fiat brand and all of FCA Group’s marketing activities – was gripped by a moment of hesitation. He hadn’t been entirely ready to tell his mentor that he’d engaged Hollywood’s bad boy for the Abarth 500 advert, in which Sheen would be seen zooming down the corridors of his mansion amid scantily dressed babes and a handful of parvenus by the pool, before stepping out of the car cheekily wearing an electronic ankle monitor courtesy of the Californian police. “Over my dead body,” Marchionne scoffed. But then he muttered,“I suppose you’ll do it anyway. And plus, in America we’ve got nothing to lose, so you might as well push ahead fearlessly, since fear breeds mediocrity. And in the end, it’ll be wonderful.”
A few months after Marchionne’s death, Olivier François recalls this and other stories about him with warm, amused admiration. He describes their poker games on aeroplanes, betting million after million. “Afterwards he’d get a Ferrari notebook, write the amount he’d lost and hand you the slip. Obviously, he never paid anyone.”They spoke Italian in Italy, English in Detroit and French at the gambling table. “I’m Parisian and he enjoyed making fun of my arrogant side. He used to say I was his nightmare.”
François is certainly the agitator in the FCA world. “I’m also a bit like the clown or schmuck of the gang,” he jokes, as quick to mock himself as he is to sing his own praises. He’s pulled off the most important communication strategies in Fiat’s recent history, and he’ll be accompanying the 500 all the way to 2020, when the car’s electric model is due for launch.
François is a man with dar ing ideas, wide-ranging connections and star-studded friendships. For his 57th birthday in early October, Sting and Shaggy sent him a text with the words: “Are you happy?”Their message included a link to the music video Gotta Get Back My Baby, in which the two singers cruise around Miami in an Abarth 124 Spider. Clocking up over 3 million views, this product placement originated from a good old long-standing friendship. “Next week I’m off to Los Angeles to see some friends, the usual crowd,” he says elusively, referring to the record-industry legends Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones and Jimmy Iovine, who are unfailing guests at his table. He also mentions the president of Paramount Pictures Jim Gianopulos and his wife, who love showing up at top Los Angeles restaurants in their 500 and parking it in a line of tank-like Cadillac Escalades and Lincoln Navigators. “In America I drive a 6000cc Ram 1500,” he admits, “because for a man, especially in the USA, it’s a real statement to dr ive a 3.65-metre car.”
The 500’s masculinisation has been established more subtly, via the casting of Adrien Brody in the Riva model campaign, through to the conception of the 500 Collezione together with L’Uomo Vogue. “With the magazine it’s far more than a media partnership. It’s a question of stylistic inspiration and a way to position ourselves as high as possible in men’s universe.We’ll be launching a new 500 Collezione every autumn, just like fashion apparel. And my dream is to produce at least 10,000 of them in Europe.” According to François, the most successful partnerships are those in which you cannot tell who is endorsing who, because both partners equally endorse each other. “The example with
L’Uomo Vogue is emblematic.” It’s the most effective kind of communication, he insists, because it makes you “unique, credible and relevant”.
In his office in Turin, he has a poster of a US Congress resolution inviting the country’s schools to show the Chrysler advert broadcast during the 2011 Super Bowl.The ad features Eminem driving a Chrysler 200 around Detroit, with chimneystacks towering over the city’s atmospheric streets.The rapper enters a theatre where a full gospel choir awaits him, and he looks into the camera and says: “This is the Motor City, and this is what we do.” For sociologists, it was the turning point for the city’s renaissance, at least in the collective perception.This marketing operation was followed by others with Clint Eastwood and Bob Dylan, who readily lent their faces to advertising to send out messages of pride and belonging to the American people. “In Dylan’s ad, he says to leave beer-brewing to the Germans, phone-assembly to Asia and car-building to America. It didn’t go down well with our friends at Budweiser or Apple, with whom we make our onboard entertainment systems.”
An economics graduate from Paris-Dauphine University, the husband of singer Arianna Bergamaschi, and the former president of Lancia (he conceived the campaign with Nobel Prize winners aboard a Lancia Thema), François says he got his people skills from Marchionne. “He had exceptional dualism. He was excitable and analytical, vulnerable yet heroic, cold in his calculations but never cold on a human level. These extraordinary manager ial traits win you appreciation and credibility among artists, too.” I ask him what he thinks Marchionne might be missing most about life here on earth.“I imagine he’s suffering from the fact that he’s got a real boss now. And I’m sure he misses not being god. That’s what he was for us.”