Months before it hits dealers, Cadillac will try to build hype for its first electric Escalade with a Times Square takeover, a customized song from Big Boi and a TV and digital campaign starring Simu Liu, the actor known for roles in “Barbie” and Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.”

The vehicle, called the Escalade IQ, marks the third EV from the General Motors luxury brand, which aims to move to an all-electric fleet by 2030. It follows the Lyriq, an electric crossover that got a push with a 2021 Super Bowl ad before debuting last year; and the Celestiq, which was recently revealed and will be hand-built in small quantities, with a whopping starting price of  $340,000.

The Escalade IQ’s price tag is a tad lower—$130,000, which still places it at the very high end of the vehicle marketplace and is considerably higher than the gas-powered Escalade, whose 2023 model has a starting price of $80,795. So Cadillac must convince buyers that the IQ is worth that kind of money in an EV market that, while growing, still faces consumer skepticism over performance and driving range.

While production of the vehicle won’t start until next summer, the marketing effort begins tonight when Cadillac will take over 23 digital billboards in Times Square for an hour beginning at 7:30 p.m. ET. Content will plug the SUV’s many features, which include a 450-mile driving range per charge, a 55-inch digital dashboard screen, 126-color ambient interior lighting, a 40-speaker audio system and more. 

The videos will include language about how Cadillac reimagined its most iconic vehicle, including lines such as, “You can’t reinvent the wheel, but you can reimagine it.”

Leo Burnett is handling the campaign.

Since first rolling off the assembly line in 1998, entering the then-nascent SUV category, the Escalade quickly established itself in pop culture, ranging from mentions in rap lyrics to placements in movies and video games, as Motortrend documented in 2020. 

The IQ marks a “proud moment” of taking a vehicle “that's been so much the face of Cadillac, and we're bringing it into EV,” said Cadillac Chief Marketing Officer Melissa Grady Dias. 

Through research, including examining Google trends, the brand discovered that the phrase “personal renaissance” has been gaining in popularity, so it attempted to apply that to Cadillac’s electric evolution. “It's not about reinvention. It's not about something new. It's really about this renaissance, and what the next phase [will] look like,” she said. “You can't reinvent the wheel…what you can do is reimagine what the wheel is. And that's really what we've done with Escalade.”

Cadillac chose Liu for the campaign because his personal story fits the reimagination theme, Grady Dias said, pointing to how he became an actor only after getting fired from his job as an accountant at Deloitte. “He took that moment to say, ‘Am I doing what I want to do with my life?’ And he totally just reimagined who he was, and … is now a Marvel superhero in the minds of so many of us,” Grady Dias said.

An ad that references his career journey will run on linear TV and streaming channels, with buys including CBS Sports, Netflix and Hulu. 

The song from Big Boi includes a video format showing him paying homage to the new IQ. The media plan for it includes digital buys on Ebony, BET and VH1. It came about spontaneously. “We were doing a separate activation for the 50th anniversary of hip hop—Big Boi was part of that. And he saw the Escalade IQ, and he wrote a song about it,” Grady Dias said.

Read more on how hip-hop transformed culture and marketing

It's not the first time Big Boi has sung about Cadillac. He was a member of OutKast when it release the single “Two Dope Boyz (In a Cadillac)" in 1996, which the group revived with an animated video in 2021.