Ford is planning an expansive new brand advertising campaign beginning next month, but with a twist—at least for Ford. The new initiative will begin with traditional TV and print treatments and only then segue into an extensive social media and digital phase. Lately, Ford has gotten a reputation for doing just the opposite.

But the main point of this effort, which Ford is calling its "And Not Or" campaign, is to highlight the fact that buyers can have great fuel economy with Ford's EcoBoost engines as well as other important attributes of Ford vehicles including roominess, styling and performance.

"We're going to communicate good fuel ecomomy, but we're the brand that gives you 'and' as well—for example, fuel economy with functionality," Scott Kelly, Ford's marketing-communications manager, told brandchannel. "It's a unique proposition. Our brand promise is that we 'Go Further.' With this, we're trying to underscore that we are the brand that goes further."Continue reading...

Three years after its Fiesta Movement campaign wrote a new playbook for social-media marketing, Ford is launching a "Social Remix" for the 2014 Ford Fiesta that it hopes will represent a similar advance—and sell more cars—through an industry-first paid-media campaign that is completely crowdsourced.

Scott Monty, global head of social media for Ford, is unveiling the Fiesta Movement remix at a Social Media Week panel in New York this morning. Monty told brandchannel before the session that "we're taking the core idea of Fiesta Movement, which is still a very solid concept, and taking it to the next level."

The automaker is introducing the new Feista through a multichannel campaign that will be entirely crowdsourced by consumers. Also, in an echo of the original Fiesta Movement year-long campaign that gave new Fiestas to bloggers and other online influencers ahead of the car's 2011 debut, Ford is once again seeking 100 "social influencers" to convey the "unique personality and attributes" of the attributes of the new car — but "in an entirely different way," as the automaker stated in a press release.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...