The program — which included a test-drive program — has elicited the interest of about 50,000 potential buyers, 97% of which don’t drive a Ford at present.
In toto, official Fiesta Movement content has drawn 4.3 million YouTube views, 540,000 flickr views and 3 million Twitter impressions.
These are quite remarkable results, indeed!
And all this is achieved with „$0 ad spent and a fraction of marketing costs“. I assume it really does compare well to traditional advertising efforts.
Yet communicating a figure of $0 seems to send out the wrong signal. The total costs (for 100 cars, the website, the staff at Ford, etc.) might be „a fraction“ of what is usually spend, but somehow I can’t imagine this whole campaing having been „cheap“.
In Germany in 2006, we had Opel (of GM) giving 4 Opel cars to bloggers for 4 weeks. Now, 3 years later and in the US, where everything is bigger, longer, etc. Ford does something even bigger and longer:
In the ultimate foreign exchange program, our 100 agents are spending six months behind the wheel of their own Fiesta, sharing their experiences, and completing monthly missions to show you what experiencing the Ford Fiesta is all about, way in advance of the U.S. launch in 2010.
FiestaMovement.com pulls in all of our agents’ content across the web to let you follow the Movement in one convenient place. And each month will highlight different themed Missions, from Travel, Adventure, and Social Activism to Technology, Style & Design, and Entertainment.
Apparently, over 4.000 people applied for this. You can follow the agents on all the usual social media suspects: twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr and on blogs. Plus potentially a few more – it seems to be up to the individual agents, where they want to be present.
The main campaign site is an aggregator of all the agents‘ content. All photos, blog entries, youtube videos,tweets, etc. you can follow on this site, or alternatively via one common RSS feed. Unfortunately, you are not able to participate in any way on the campaign site. No comment option, no voting, etc. At least for now. Once they start the monthly missions (from May 3rd) this might change, we’ll see. However, it might well be their strategy to keep participation in those places, where the content is, where users are used to participate with content: within the social networks themselves.
According to this source here (in German), the project is the single most important piece of „marketing“ for that car. Sounds like there will be no TV, no print advertising, etc. Quite an interesting approach, definitely one I will follow and see how it develops.
I really like social media aggregation projects like this. They are amongst the most complex to implement, believe me, both in terms of technical integration, as well as working out responsibilities and processes within the agency and with the client. Especially when you’re dealing with time frames that last longer than the usual campaign, i.e. at least 6 months, as in this case (if you include recruitment and teaser phase, which we seem to be in right now).
Last, but not least, you need considerable staff 24/7 to maintain the community to filter not acceptable content (yes, for most projects, there will be some!), if they do actually monitor external commentary. (Because, as mentioned above, you don’t seem to be able to comment or participate at all.)
(By the way, does anyone know the agency behind this?)
Need a short URL for twitter? try http://url.so-smart.be/ instead of the typical tinyurl.com – this is a nice marketing idea by smart, the shortest car around. 😉
A nice new advert by Hondy, in stopmotion, using lots and lots of cars:
A card board trailer of „300“ by Panasonic – what would happen to Hollywood given the current financial crisis. It belongs to a German UGC campaign of Panasonic. At the microsite papphelden.de you can upload your own cardboard version of a Hollywood Blockbuster an win lots of prizes.
A rather cruel (viral) video, could be a little less gruesome, if you ask me. But then, some say, a good viral video needs violence, blood and disgustingness. However, they called it: „violence is no solution“ – it’s an advert for a secure e-commerce shop.
While in Paris on a connecting flight, Pharrel tries to order a Big Mac while it’s still 6am – and the french staff neither know Pharrel, nor do they want to offer him anything but breakfast – and last but not least they don’t seem to know him and aren’t impressed at all by his musical performance:
A McDonald’s rep confirmed that the stunt wasn’t commissioned by the fast feeder. However, he was impressed with the publicity. The rep said: „We were surprised and entertained by the video of Pharrell performing [our jingle]. We certainly welcome him as a customer, and we appreciated his spontaneous and funky celebration of our food.“
And I wonder: what will McD do next, how will they appropriately (digitally) respond to this video, which gathered half a million views in only a few days?
I already blogged about the current Doritos contest before. At Adrants I just found out about the fact that Doritos has announced their 5 top contestants for the superbowl television commercial. These are:
One of them will be shown during the superbowl. Even the contestants don’t know yet, which one will be aired. They will have to wait until superbowl sunday, in order to find out whether they won, or not. And they will only win the $1 mio., if the ad tops the USA TODAYs annual Ad Meter.
I don’t know how likely that will be, but if the ad competes against all the other professionally made ads of last year, it will be difficult for this particular consumer to rank high, I guess.
Wo ich sonst so bin...