Co-creation is one of several contemporary trends linking the socialisation of communication with consumer generated content.
This collaborative initiative sees Ford invite consumers to help co-create a new collection of images that capture the essence of ‘now’.
This full-blown campaign, led by Ogilvy, has integrated Ford Fiesta’s TV commercial (itself directed by the famous stop-motion animator Noah Harris) with a set of media partners across multiple platforms on the theme of ‘This is Now’. The idea was to invite users to capture and share images that define ‘now’ for them.
With a presence of more than 30 years in the automotive market, some consumers felt that the Ford Fiesta had come to represent all that was dull and uninteresting in the world, so the challenge was to connect with a group of fashion-focused, upwardly-mobile 20-somethings and reposition the new Ford Fiesta as a desirable must-have.
The solution was to reinvent the Fiesta as a style icon by making it ‘the Zeitgeist’ – This Is Now.
So the campaign became an alliance between Ford and a set of ‘now’ media partners like Vogue, GQ, Last FM and established a ‘This is Now’ blog.
The objective is to go beyond classic marketing for passive consumers, and become an active call for prosumers’ positive contribution towards the brand and its reputation, and also to a wider thinking about the present and the future and what that means for different people.
Hoping to create an inspiring and innovative project, Violette Vérité and Kai Chan Vong curated the blog (note how the blog itself is being assimilated with a gallery), where users collaborate to define their interpretation of the present through UGC of music, film and photography.
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By first populating the blog by work from promising art students and then opening it up to the public, the project has also succeeded in promoting art in the wider sense, by helping launch artists’ careers, through their involvement with this innovative European-wide project.
The results were impressive too.
The Fiesta portal has enjoyed over 1,039,938 visitors to date from 22 countries. 98,850 of those visitors became registered sales leads (9.5% of the total number of portal visitors) and 21,082 requested a test drive. Sales of the new Fiesta were 31% above Ford’s target.
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