Brand content development: FIESTA MOVEMENT

Marketing people at FORD as well as many other marketing departments all over the world, directly want to invest in building an audience at least for a concrete campaign. This is a potential growing trend, content not sponsored by brands, but created and promoted by brands directly. In fact, FORD is developing a kind of road movie through a reality show.

The Ford Fiesta has come to play on the American roads.  In the ultimate foreign exchange program, our 100 agents will spend 6 months behind the wheel of their own Fiesta, lifestreaming their experiences, and completing monthly missions to show you what the Fiesta is all about.

Ford will give a free car for 6 months to 100 drivers in exchange of the uploading their driving experiences. Those 100 drivers will compete for getting their stories spread through any social platform.

Fiesta Movement is an attempt of FORD for creating user generated content, getting viral marketing impact, and, why not, checking their own ability to getting positive return on audience. Brands and products want “to be the content”, to be part of the content creation and promotion, and so, advertisers are competing for audience just like any other media.  This campaign may include buying traffic through advertising in other media to increase viral effects.

It is difficult to measure impact in terms of direct ROA for this campaign, but it could be possible to compare the awareness of this campaign compared with others.

Key learnings of this experience remind us some basic principles to maximize returns:

- Reduce content creation costs: They know it may be cheaper to develop a decentralized content generation strategy, not just in content creators/sources but also in platforms.

- Keep a local focus: they select people in different locations across US to be as close as possible to their audience.

- Building engaging contents, with quick and continuous updates, uncertain in their results that may keep audience coming back to them.

- By getting impact in “traditional media” they are also jumping into media without a direct budget for this (I did also “create” contents in my previous working experience, where we intensively used PR).

- Be aware, advertising is not an endless gold mine, “content” businesses need alternative revenue streams to keep independent and sustainable.

In the other hand, while for media companies, as content distribution through social platforms become to some extent a commodity, brands are a growing competitor, for media professionals, it is an opportunity because the business of building profitable audiences will continue to be relevant.