Ford's latest spots for its Lincoln MKS and EcoBoost engine continues the company's steadfast commitment to advertising that ensures nobody understands what it's selling. It's not only that I don't like the campaign, but I honestly don't understand it.
The Lincoln MKS sorta kinda looks like most other sedans, perhaps even luxuriously so. The ad makes this fact very plain, and does so in a very plain, generic, this-is-what-car-companies-do sort of way. Flashback to a couple of years ago and you'd see the same garbage: quick cuts of car exteriors and interiors interspersed with the vehicle speeding down (a. urban street, b. long, winding mountain road, and/or c. spinning or sliding to a stop). The commercial could have been made in the 1970s for all it shares in terms of unique content or relevant messaging.
I thought car makers would have realized by now that these sheet metal love paeans do nothing except mollify dealers who shouldn't be dictating advertising creative, and put money into the pockets of ad creatives who make a living mollifying dealers. $6 billion spent by Detroit last year proved the point that doing the same thing over and over again doesn't sell cars.
And there's the rub, because Ford isn't doing the same thing, at least not operationally. The EcoBoost engine is a cool, unique innovation, and the company is pulling a Wal-Mart by standardizing an environmentally-friendly product vs. making some symbolic green gesture and hyping the hell out of it. The engine gets 20% better fuel economy and generates 15% fewer CO2 emissions and, like Wal-Mart committing to putting affordable fluorescent bulbs on its store shelves, Ford is going to put it into a half million of its vehicles over the next 5 years.
This is a real, meaningful step, yet Ford seems to be going out of its way to keep it a secret. Instead, its branding is a broken record, going so far as to repurpose the 70s song "Don't Fear The Reaper." I don't know about you, but about the only thing this TV spot does is make me want more cowbell.
I can imagine the logic that drove the strategy, though, and I suspect it relied on two false assumptions: first, that automotive branding is still all about imaginary aspirations, desires and ego. Those emotions are key drivers of sales, but the way brands get to them -- whether for cars or anything else -- is based on meaning, relevance and utility, and not so much on the traditional artifice of branding. Sexy is still sexy, but you get it by doing sexy things, not declaring them. The Lincoln MKS spots show me stuff but tell me absolutely nothing that matters.
Could the EcoBoost have been used as a key differentiator? Is it possible to make green sexy? It would have been a harder challenge than regurgitating old car imagery, but perhaps it could have yielded a better campaign.
Second, I suspect that the brand gurus still equate exposure to marketing messages -- whether defined as eyeballs in front of a TV screen, or time spent chatting through a social media campaign -- as the same thing as consumption, internalization, and subsequent use.
It's not.
Consumers aren't looking for relationships with brands today, but rather hoping that brands will deliver the meaning, relevance, and utility that all the blather that brands promise to deliver. The wait time for that fulfillment is a nanosecond. Further, the medium really isn't the message (it never was, at least wholly), though the metrics used to measure most of the activities Ford and other companies are using to replace old-fashioned media tracking seem to claim otherwise. The message is the message, which means it needs to be clear, memorable, and useful (whether it's funny, shocking, or award-winning is a means to an end). A forwarded video that is only entertaining is still only entertaining; no brand can own funny or sexy. Successful brands don't promise, they deliver. Now.
The EcoBoost engine seems to me to be a real opportunity for Ford to get consumers closer to its business and the reality of car purchase, yet it choose to use its broadcast ad buy to do the exact opposite. I'm not aware that its using social media to do anything more than get consumers chatting about their chatter.
The company needs less distraction and obfuscation. Its new engine, and the fact that it wants to sell cars, shouldn't be kept secret.
