Saturday, February 6, 2010

Ford and the Twitterati

I just came across something about the shift to digital advertising that struck me as unusually alarming for traditional media.
Ford Motor Co. has publicly announced that 25% of its marketing budget is going to digital and social media. That's more than double the 9% car industry norm, according to J.D. Power. Given how much auto-makers spend on marketing, that suggests hundreds of millions more ad dollars could leave TV, newspapers and radio if Ford's strategy pays off.
I learned this from a help-wanted ad from Advertising Age, which wants a Silicon Valley-based social-media reporter so it can serve its readers better. It was reacting to an October story in Business Week's Auto Beat Blog, which I had missed. http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2009/10/ford_spending_2.html
Business Week's report said that Ford is especially excited by a social-media marketing trial it is conducting for the Ford Fiesta, which is sold in Europe and will come to the U.S. this year. It had a contest to let 100 Europeans drive the car and share their experiences. According to Business Week: "Ford isn’t saying what it’s cost on the program is. But it says that (it) has created 11 million social networking impressions; five million engagements on social networks (people sharing and receiving); 11,000 videos have been posted; 15,000 Tweets (not including re-tweets), 13,000 photos." This let Ford build a mailing list of 50,000 people in the U.S., hardly any of them Ford owners, who want to be informed of the launch.
Ford recently has been the smartest of the U.S. car makers. People hoping that ad dollars will soon back to mainstream media better hope Ford's wrong this time.

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