When those car doors shut, we all get a little more… real.
What started off as a brief to make a “quick and cheap” Father’s day announcement, lead me to one of my favourite discoveries about the Ford audience. People are really freaking weird when they’re alone in their cars. There’s something about being enclosed away from the rest of the world that brings out our raw, uninhibited, chaotic, and weird natures.
No Actors. No Scripts. Just life.
'For each national day, I worked to find a related truth. For Father’s day, we filmed dads taking their kids on their first driving lesson. For siblings day.. We just put siblings in the car and watched the bedlam unfold. For Christmas? We focused on designated drivers. All shot with real people and a fly-on-the-wall camera, edited later to focus in on the best bits. The films literally wrote themselves.
When we launched the Father’s day campaign across the Ford of Europe organic social media channels, we were overwhelmed by the response. It quickly became the most successful social campaign for Ford of Europe to date with a 30% engagement rate. Ford quickly backed the campaign with paid media spend and invested more money into the creative campaign, turning it into a series. The second video, “Sibling rivalry”, was even more successful with a 43% engagement rate. We learned that our audience would rather see the cars being used authentically than our usual “perfect” product videos.
Ford EU’s most successful social campaign
From designated drivers to lone car singers
I was given the joy of remaining creative lead on this project until I left the agency. From creative ideation to directing the production and editing, the real-life nature of this project made each project completely unique.