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Ford’s “Bold Moves” campaign to revamp its stodgy corporate image and appeal to new types of consumers has made an appropriate ad buy - on 400 blogs.
In its quest to remake itself and appeal to a younger and environmentally aware audience, Ford Motor Company is running ads on 400 blogs via BlogAds, reports Jalopnik (via Micro Persuasion and MarketingVox). The ads, running on the Gothamist and Treehugger, among hundreds of others, promote a documentary on Ford’s new Bold Moves site, which is hosting a weekly documentary series intended to “rip out the B.S.” (It has its own blog, too.)
The campaign, designed by JWT, touts the Bold Moves “Episode 8: Bold Moves, Big City”; the ad’s tagline is “The Future of Fuel, the Future of Ford,” with the image of an oil pump silhouetted against a horizon, writes iMedia Connection. Below the image is a couple of lines of text: “With one of the worst fuel efficiency records of any car company, Ford is trying to ‘go green.’ As another oil crisis looms on the horizon, can they turn talk into action?”
According to Jalopnik, Henry Copeland of BlogAds was apparently so excited about the campaign that he emailed the blogs owners, terming the self-critical ad “the first Cluetrain ad” (in reference to the Cluetrain Manifesto).
Copeland writes, “Now, down a few billion bucks and peddling gas-guzzlers, Ford has drunk the Cluetrain cool-aid. Eschewing the ’same old tone, same old lies’ and the ’soothing humorless monotone,’ this Ford ad celebrates the brutally honest conversations that are essential to its revival. And Ford’s BoldMoves project finds an ideal counterpart in the blogosphere, the great American brainstorm.”
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