Client: Ford Canada
Campaign: A Ford EV Production
Timing: September 12th - November 30th , 2022
The Challenge
Electric vehicles may only account for ~10% of automotive sales, but they are the driving force of the category today. Electrification is how today’s automakers and the category are defined and evaluated. Every year, automakers release new EVs onto the market in what is becoming a quickly saturated, undifferentiated category. EV communications have fallen into typical automotive category conventions making for immediately recognizable and forgettable “car ads” conveying little more than “we are going electric.” For Ford, who is not only trying to breakthrough the EV noise, but also trying to overcome its own overbearing legacy, more of the same would simply not be enough. The chief task is to change the legacy perceptions of Ford as a symbol of the past to a credible, leading EV maker for the future.
The Insight
The next generation of vehicle buyers, primarily younger, digitally engaged Millennials, are the ones who don’t see Ford as a leader in EVs. Before you can sell a Ford EV to them, you have to sell them on Ford as different from any of their preconceived notions. As any marketer knows, attention is the battleground for this cohort. Other automakers are using the same playbook to market their EVs as for combustion engines making for easily ignorable ads, on channels they aren’t paying attention to. Ford needed to reimagine its communication, and step away from traditional vehicle marketing in order to stand out and connect with them. That meant something special that fulfills their desire for discovery. A real piece of interesting, talkworthy culture they can enjoy and see value in without being put off as overt marketing.
In order to break free from its traditional legacy and stand out from the pack, Ford needed an unexpected, non-traditional, digital-led way of convincing people it wasn’t the automaker you thought it was.
The Execution
The effort centered around the making of two pieces of content, distributed exclusively through digital. The first was a short film by rising star director Danilo Parra titled “Mushroom” and a second behind-the-scenes film documenting how the film was completely powered by Ford vehicles. For two days of filming, the new, all-electric F-150 Lightning was the workhorse, powering the main production equipment. Everything from cameras, wind machines, sound equipment, lighting and rain machines. The E-transit vans powered everything else; craft services, video village, digital imaging tech and a real time editing suite.
With the two films in hand, we went about promoting them in typical movie fashion. Because the project created a legitimate piece of content, it opened up distribution channels typically closed to brands and branded content. And those are precisely the platforms our targets dedicate so much of their time – exactly where we needed to be. We made an arrangement with Crave to be the exclusive streaming platform of both films ensuring that Ford would be prominent in a preferred space. The films also livestreamed on YouTube and across a number of influential Twitch accounts. Promotion for the films started with a teaser and trailer across broad reaching digital/social channels two weeks prior to release. Support for the movie ramped-up directing people to "watch now" in digital/social along with OOH movie posters. As with any film, PR played a big role in drawing attention to the effort with sponsored posts on a handful of culture sites.
The Results/Impact.
The “Ford EV Production” was done to help reshape Ford’s perceptions as a leading brand in the EV space. In Ford's proprietary tracking the key metric of "EV Index" (an aggregate measure of EV reputation and consideration) is used as the main assessment of how brands stack up overall as leaders in people’s minds. The release of the "Mushroom" films helped shift the stubborn perceptions of Ford by moving the "EV Index" by over 16% in a short period for a measure had been relatively stable for months. For context, Tesla has had a 45-50+ lead of “EV Index” compared to the next nearest competitor for years proving its dominance. Furthermore, the effort helped shift perceptions of Ford as an EV leader more broadly with the metric "One of the leading brands making EVs" rose 11% as it showed Ford in a much different light. Not to mention the films garnered over 110,000+ streams in the first month alone making it one of the top 15 most viewed pieces of content on the Crave platform.