In 1922, under Barton's leadership, BDO took General Motors as a client. Earlier that year Alfred P. Sloan, the new president of GM, had commissioned a study to determine the nature of the company's public image. In short, the study revealed that GM did not have one. Most of the public was familiar with the brands of General Motors divisions such as Chevrolet, Cadillac, and Buick, but few people thought of them as a part of the parent company. In many ways, they didn't act like part of the same company either. Coordination and cooperation between the divisions was poor at best.Therefore, part of Barton's goal was to increase unification of the divisions under the GM name. The result was the famous corporate identity campaigns of 1923 and 1924 which introduced consumers to the "famous family" called General Motors. With Sloan's need to unify GM to maintain control of the company, Barton became more than a simple adman for GM; Sloan soon brought him on as a corporate counselor. The goal of the advertising never escaped Barton, who was careful to keep in mind that the division managers were his true audience.
Barton maintained the allegory of GM as the "famous family" throughout the campaigns. Headlines such as, "Making the nation a neighborhood" mixed images of George Washington skillfully linked with copy about GM. "The family's home" headline ran above an image of the General Motors Building in Detroit. An ad to dispel the image of GM as a corporation controlled by a few wealthy male investors heralded "Mothers, sisters, wives" as stockholders in General Motors.
In all, Bruce Barton was largely if not solely responsible for BDO's work for General Motors. Marchand states:
It seems probable, although I have not been able to discover any large body of his correspondence with GM, that Barton personally carried on most of his agency's ongoing counsel with General Motors executives. Internal GM documents mention only Barton when they describe the BDO agency's strenuous efforts to merchandise the institutional campaign within the GM organization. And a BDO account summary notes that Barton met with Sloan every other week and frequently went to Detroit. (1998)