Aston Martin draws bids.

ConAgra to buy Ralcorp in huge packaged-foods deal.

Nintendo sells out Wii U in first week in US.

Adidas features celebs including Snoop Lion, other celebrities in Ebenezer Scrooge holiday campaign.

Airbus jabs Boeing with "Pinocchio nose" in ad campaign.

Barnes & Noble updates holiday wish lists via Nook campaign.

Bombardier signs largest-ever deal, with VistaJet.

Ericsson files patent claim against Samsung.

Mario Batali expands restaurant empire to Boston.Continue reading...

Ford has been moving from one major social-media marketing innovation to the next, so it comes as little surprise that the brand is mounting a major digital and social effort around the 2013 Ford Fusion mid-size sedan.

"Random Acts of Fusion" is a multi-platform, transmedia campaign that features Ryan Seacrest as its "emcee." It centers around a contest in which consumers will "Unlock" how Fusion is able to "transform" the lives of people who drive it, Crystal Worthem, manager of Ford Brand Content & Alliances, stated.

In its slowly unfolding, almost teasing aspect, unlike previous Ford campaigns predicated on quick social-media participation, the Facebook-centered campaign is building anticipation by inviting fans to register and then stay tuned: "What's in the box? Register below to find out. Ryan will send one to each of the first 2,500 people who sign up for Random Acts of Fusion. Then come back to Facebook.com/FordFusion on July 5th to find out what happens next."

The teaser campaign "is designed to invoke emotion, which the [car] design does," Scott Monty, Ford's director of social media, told brandchannel. And the promotion is built "to go with people where they go — desktop to mobile to digital to social to experiential."Continue reading...

Ford became the industry trailblazer in social media three years when it launched the "Fiesta Movement" about a year ahead of the Fiesta's availability to car-buyers. The marketing experiment seemed to work in spades, but now sales of the model are slumping.

Are other factors to blame for the sales slump, and is it not a problem, as Ford executives insist? Or does the fact that Fiesta sales are falling off after only two years suggest anything at all about the effectiveness of a marketing platform for the car that has been largely based on social media?Continue reading...

Ford is pursuing the Millennial generation these days like the rest of the global auto industry. But so far the carmakers' love largely has gone unrequited by a car-reluctant cohort.

Now, Ford hopes that a new Mustang can keep wooing Generation Y the way that its new Ford Fiesta did when it debuted a couple of years ago. Ford design chief J Mays has been telling folks for a while that the 2014 Mustang will comprise perhaps the nameplate's sharpest departure ever from the "pony car" that first excited the baby boomers a half-century ago under the guidance of then-Ford executive Lee Iacocca.

The company will have to be cautious. In the 1970s, after mistakenly believing that the appeal of the original, muscular, blockish Mustang design had run its course with the car market, Ford introduced a vastly diluted design and called it Mustang II.Continue reading...

Ford really likes this reality-show thing. Its latest experiment, Escape Routes, has yet to reach mid-season on NBC, and the company announces another series with a similar format to be produced with Yahoo.

Yahoo and Ford will welcome the availability in May of Ford's first all-electric car, the Focus Electric, with Plugged In, which Yahoo is calling its first reality competition series. It'll be broadcast exclusively on the Yahoo! Screen service, and will feature six two-person teams competing against one another in a series fo challenges centered on the chance to win a Focus Electric.

Sounds a lot like Escape Routes, the Saturday-night series entering its third week right now on NBC. The teams of Millennials are competing for cash (and air time, of course), but the real star of this trailblazing program is the 2013 version of the Escape SUV. And the first episodes show a lot of the vehicle. Continue reading...

Arguably, Ford is leading the U.S. auto industry when it comes to understanding the behavior and buying preferences of the Millennial generation. That's one big reason Ford was able to steal a march on all of its competitors with the Sync infotainment system — by making it available in the first place, to work with most smart phones, and then by promoting it heavily as a must-have "accessory" in small vehicles aimed at twentysomethings, including the Focus and Fiesta.

That obviously is the type of insight also underlying a deal with Zipcar that Ford announced today (a deal previewed in the New York Times). Just in time for back to school, Ford will supply the car-sharing service with up to 1,000 Focus sedans and Explorer SUVs to Zipcar locations on 250 college and university campuses in the United States.Continue reading...

Two ads currently in heavy rotation during football games may not initially appear to have anything in common. One is for an automobile. The other is for insurance.

Look a little deeper, though, and the two ads share a fundamental structure. They also share one other detail: ineffectiveness.Continue reading...

Ford's just-released interactive app for Apple's iPad showcases the 2011 Fiesta. The app highlights "the vehicle's 15 class-exclusive features, 40 mpg story, connectivity and accessories."

Fiesta is the first Ford model to use an app (iPad only, so far). With more than 3 million Apple iPads sold to date, the automaker says "this is the perfect opportunity for Ford to reach out to customers, by creating an interactive sales brochure that provides a depth of information not found in a typical dealer brochure."
 
Ford executive Thomais Zaremba comments: "Fiesta target consumers are heavily digitally inclined and often lead the way with new technology adoption. The Fiesta App gives these customers the information they want, in a format they expect. It’s another way for us to reach out to customers in the digital and social media space."