Mindshare, Ford's agency, has developed a partnership with Bauer Access, Bauer's new commercial creative initiative, centred on an experiential event and amplified through an online content and social strategy. The partnership allows Ford to fully utilise the paid, owned and earned media channels in one integrated execution across a range of influential Bauer Media brands.
Ford's Focus is still the UK's biggest selling car, thirteen years after it launched. As well as targeting existing Ford and Focus customers, the new campaign called "Start More" includes social, radio and TV in order to engage new consumers and bring them to, through a variety of platforms, a bespoke Facebook hub to view and share Bauer created content.
All activity will drive awareness of a large scale experiential event to celebrate the launch of the 2011 Focus. The event, to be held at a secret London venue, will be divided into five zones, each themed around the audience's passions in life; sport, music, driving, gadgets and food. Each of these passions will also be reflected in the online content that consumers have been able to view, and share, on Facebook in the lead up to the event. 200 winners will attend the event, to be hosted by Tim Lovejoy and there will also be appearances from some of the talent featured in the online content, culminating in a set featuring a headline music act.
A combination of press advertorials, TV sponsorship, radio promotion and online traffic drivers, running across a wide range of platforms including Empire, Q, Mojo, Golf World, 4Music and Bauer's leading commercial radio stations will promote the virtues of the 2011 Focus and encourage readers, listeners and viewers to log on to the Facebook hub. The hub offers consumers the chance to learn more about the car and view a variety of entertaining and sharable content hosted by Tim Lovejoy. Users can also enter an online competition to attend the event in May.
The campaign is also supported by a more traditional £4m launch burst of activity across TV, cinema, press, outdoor and online, all of which will feature URLs encouraging consumers to visit the Facebook hub.
The campaign has been bought and planned by Mindshare. Ogilvy has produced the offline creative work and worked with Bauer to produce the Facebook content and manage the event. Wunderman has produced the online creative work and designed the Facebook hub.
Jo Lyall, Head of Integration and Partnerships at Mindshare said: "This partnership is a fantastic demonstration of a new marketing model around sharable content that sees content created with one partner transferred and used in multiple places and on new platforms. Putting a content partnership at the heart of the Focus launch communication allows us to give consumers an engaging experience around the brand and build a long term relationship through the Facebook platform.
Bauer Access Creative Director Brent Coulson commented: "We launched Bauer Access to harness the best insight, intuition, talent and ideas we have to collaborate with our commercial partners to create original content. We are delighted that Ford UK have partnered with our unrivalled portfolio of influential cross-media brands and shared in our vision to underpin the entire launch campaign with a unique range of content and activity."
