Ford Turns to the \'Crowd\' for New Fiesta Ads

Four years ago, the Ford Motor Company brought out the Ford Fiesta subcompact with an innovative program that recruited young drivers - members of the target audience for the new car - to help introduce it through blogs and other social media. Now, that effort is being expanded into the realm of marketing as Ford plans a crowdsourcing initiative to create advertising for the 2014 Fiesta.

Executives of Ford plan to announce on Tuesday morning, at a session of Social Media Week in New York, that they intend to recruit 100 socially-connected consumers to produce a year’s worth of advertising for the next Fiesta, which would begin appearing in the spring.

Information about the initiative will be available on a special Web site, fiestamovement.com.

The would-be Madison Avenue ad executives will be asked to create video clips that could serve as commercials, on television or online; digital ads; ads fr social media like Facebook and YouTube; and even ads for magazines and newspapers.

Crowdsourcing as a way to create advertising has been a popular trend for several years as marketers seek to take advantage of new technologies to forge closer ties with consumers.

Ads created by consumers have even appeared in high-profile venues that include the Super Bowl, for brands like Doritos and Mennen Speed Stick, and during episodes of “American Idol,” where Coca-Cola ran one such commercial, with a Valentine’s Day theme, on Thursday.

Automotive brands have also taken part in the trend, among them the Chevrolet division of General Motors, which ran a crowdsourced commercial during Super Bowl XLVI last year.

But looking to nonprofessionals to come up with a year’s worth of ads is unusual, if not unique. “This is Ford’s first completely user-generated campaign,” said James Farley of Ford.

Although “there are some risks,” Mr. Farley acknowledged in a phone interview last week, he likened the experiment to the leap that marketers took decades ago with a new medium called television.

“There are new rules, new things to learn about,” said Mr. Farley, who is executive vice president for global marketing, sales and service and Lincoln.

For instance, Mr. Farley said, “if you ask people to help you produce advertising, they expect to see what they do without a lot of filters.”

“You have to be extremely careful about providing too much help,” he added.

That was a lesson Ford Motor learned in 2009, Mr. Farley said, when the company introduced the Fiesta by giving cars to 100 young men and omen and asking them to share their experiences on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“We had a traditional ad campaign, and we had a digital ad campaign we created with them,” he said, and the latter ads were “a little overdeveloped; they sounded like a company trying to be young.”

This time around, for what the company is calling Fiesta Movement: A Social Remix, 100 young men and women will be lent cars, this time the 2014 model. Some will be alumni of the Fiesta introduction, some will be new recruits and some will be celebrities.

Just like the original version of the Fiesta Movement, the drivers of the cars will be supplied with gasoline, insurance coverage and equipment like cameras, then asked to complete tasks (“missions” in Ford parlance) that involve the cars.

And just like last time, the participants will be asked to share their experiences in social media. But this time, the content they create will also be the basis for Fiesta ads in other media.

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Althou! gh there will be “zero” professionally-produced ads for the 2014 Fiesta, Mr. Farley said, that does not mean the ads will be of less than professional quality.

“We’re going to shape them to be a Ford Fiesta message, not just ‘We’re having fun on the dime of a big company,’ ” he added.

As for the professionals at the advertising agencies that work with Ford, among them units of WPP like Team Detroit and Hudson Rouge, cry not for them. They will continue to create campaigns for other Ford and Lincoln models.

Mr. Farley declined to discuss what the company would spend on ads to be based on what will be created by the participants in the next installment of the Fiesta Movement. But, he said, the money saved on production costs might be added to the budget.

During 2010, the first full year of introductory advertising for Fiesta, Ford spent $102.9 million in major media to promote the car, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Ad spending fell to $42.8 million in 2011./p>

During the first nine months of 2012, ad spending totaled only $2.1 million, compared with $40.7 million during the same period of 2011. The decline reflects Ford’s intent to ramp up spending again in 2013 to promote the major changes in Fiesta for the 2014 model.

Ford Turns to the \'Crowd\' for New Fiesta Ads

Four years ago, the Ford Motor Company brought out the Ford Fiesta subcompact with an innovative program that recruited young drivers - members of the target audience for the new car - to help introduce it through blogs and other social media. Now, that effort is being expanded into the realm of marketing as Ford plans a crowdsourcing initiative to create advertising for the 2014 Fiesta.

Executives of Ford plan to announce on Tuesday morning, at a session of Social Media Week in New York, that they intend to recruit 100 socially-connected consumers to produce a year’s worth of advertising for the next Fiesta, which would begin appearing in the spring.

Information about the initiative will be available on a special Web site, fiestamovement.com.

The would-be Madison Avenue ad executives will be asked to create video clips that could serve as commercials, on television or online; digital ads; ads fr social media like Facebook and YouTube; and even ads for magazines and newspapers.

Crowdsourcing as a way to create advertising has been a popular trend for several years as marketers seek to take advantage of new technologies to forge closer ties with consumers.

Ads created by consumers have even appeared in high-profile venues that include the Super Bowl, for brands like Doritos and Mennen Speed Stick, and during episodes of “American Idol,” where Coca-Cola ran one such commercial, with a Valentine’s Day theme, on Thursday.

Automotive brands have also taken part in the trend, among them the Chevrolet division of General Motors, which ran a crowdsourced commercial during Super Bowl XLVI last year.

But looking to nonprofessionals to come up with a year’s worth of ads is unusual, if not unique. “This is Ford’s first completely user-generated campaign,” said James Farley of Ford.

Although “there are some risks,” Mr. Farley acknowledged in a phone interview last week, he likened the experiment to the leap that marketers took decades ago with a new medium called television.

“There are new rules, new things to learn about,” said Mr. Farley, who is executive vice president for global marketing, sales and service and Lincoln.

For instance, Mr. Farley said, “if you ask people to help you produce advertising, they expect to see what they do without a lot of filters.”

“You have to be extremely careful about providing too much help,” he added.

That was a lesson Ford Motor learned in 2009, Mr. Farley said, when the company introduced the Fiesta by giving cars to 100 young men and omen and asking them to share their experiences on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“We had a traditional ad campaign, and we had a digital ad campaign we created with them,” he said, and the latter ads were “a little overdeveloped; they sounded like a company trying to be young.”

This time around, for what the company is calling Fiesta Movement: A Social Remix, 100 young men and women will be lent cars, this time the 2014 model. Some will be alumni of the Fiesta introduction, some will be new recruits and some will be celebrities.

Just like the original version of the Fiesta Movement, the drivers of the cars will be supplied with gasoline, insurance coverage and equipment like cameras, then asked to complete tasks (“missions” in Ford parlance) that involve the cars.

And just like last time, the participants will be asked to share their experiences in social media. But this time, the content they create will also be the basis for Fiesta ads in other media.

!

Althou! gh there will be “zero” professionally-produced ads for the 2014 Fiesta, Mr. Farley said, that does not mean the ads will be of less than professional quality.

“We’re going to shape them to be a Ford Fiesta message, not just ‘We’re having fun on the dime of a big company,’ ” he added.

As for the professionals at the advertising agencies that work with Ford, among them units of WPP like Team Detroit and Hudson Rouge, cry not for them. They will continue to create campaigns for other Ford and Lincoln models.

Mr. Farley declined to discuss what the company would spend on ads to be based on what will be created by the participants in the next installment of the Fiesta Movement. But, he said, the money saved on production costs might be added to the budget.

During 2010, the first full year of introductory advertising for Fiesta, Ford spent $102.9 million in major media to promote the car, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Ad spending fell to $42.8 million in 2011./p>

During the first nine months of 2012, ad spending totaled only $2.1 million, compared with $40.7 million during the same period of 2011. The decline reflects Ford’s intent to ramp up spending again in 2013 to promote the major changes in Fiesta for the 2014 model.

Hong Kong Disneyland Turns a Profit

LOS ANGELES â€" Mickey Mouse is finally making money in Hong Kong.

The Walt Disney Company on Monday said that its seven-year-old theme park and resort complex in Hong Kong turned a profit for the first time â€" a modest $14 million, but a profit nonetheless â€" following an aggressive expansion costing several hundred million dollars.

To compare, the park lost about $31 million dollars during the previous fiscal period. As recently as 2008, the park was losing roughly $200 million a year. Disney owns 48 percent of Hong Kong Disneyland, with the balance controlled by the local government.

Disney said attendance at the park increased 13 percent last year, to 6.7 million people. Revenue was up 18 percent; occupancy at two themed hotels, which have a combined 1,000 rooms, stood at 92 percent.

Hong Kong Disneyland has been the smallest of Disney’s theme parks around the world, limiting interest in annual passes and repeat attendance. But a continuing expansion to increase the size ofHong Kong Disneyland by 25 percent appears to have had dramatic effects.

Already open are new rides themed to the “Toy Story” movies and an Old-West area called Grizzly Gulch; coming this spring is another area called Mystic Point, billed by Disney as “the site of mysterious forces and supernatural events in the heart of a dense, uncharted rain forest.”

One question for the future: To what degree, if any, will Disney’s mega-resort in Shanghai, now under construction and scheduled to open in 2015, take wind out of Hong Kong Disneyland’s sails

Hong Kong Disneyland Turns a Profit

LOS ANGELES â€" Mickey Mouse is finally making money in Hong Kong.

The Walt Disney Company on Monday said that its seven-year-old theme park and resort complex in Hong Kong turned a profit for the first time â€" a modest $14 million, but a profit nonetheless â€" following an aggressive expansion costing several hundred million dollars.

To compare, the park lost about $31 million dollars during the previous fiscal period. As recently as 2008, the park was losing roughly $200 million a year. Disney owns 48 percent of Hong Kong Disneyland, with the balance controlled by the local government.

Disney said attendance at the park increased 13 percent last year, to 6.7 million people. Revenue was up 18 percent; occupancy at two themed hotels, which have a combined 1,000 rooms, stood at 92 percent.

Hong Kong Disneyland has been the smallest of Disney’s theme parks around the world, limiting interest in annual passes and repeat attendance. But a continuing expansion to increase the size ofHong Kong Disneyland by 25 percent appears to have had dramatic effects.

Already open are new rides themed to the “Toy Story” movies and an Old-West area called Grizzly Gulch; coming this spring is another area called Mystic Point, billed by Disney as “the site of mysterious forces and supernatural events in the heart of a dense, uncharted rain forest.”

One question for the future: To what degree, if any, will Disney’s mega-resort in Shanghai, now under construction and scheduled to open in 2015, take wind out of Hong Kong Disneyland’s sails

First Response Targets Spanish Language TV

The birthrate among women in the United States reached a record low in 2011, led mainly by the decline in births among immigrant and native-born Hispanic women. That decline, along with the opportunity that the Hispanic community represents  for advertisers, is at the heart of a new campaign from First Response to promote its pregnancy planning tools.

On Monday, First Response will, for the first time, advertise its pregnancy test and ovulation prediction kit to a Spanish-speaking audience on television networks that include Univision, Galavision, Telemundo and MTV Tres. A 15-second version of the ad will focus on the First Response Early Result Pregnancy Test and a 30-second version will include additional information on the First Response Daily Digital Ovulation Test.

“We want to be where they are, in the language that they are watching,” Stacey Feldman the vice president for marketing at Church and Dwight, the company that owns First Response, said of the Spanish-speaking audience. The ads will feature Cynthia Olavarría, the Puerto Rican actress and former Miss Puerto Rico,  as the brand’s spokeswoman.

While the overall message of the ads in Spanish is the same as the ads in English, the company chose Ms. Olavarría to deliver the Spanish-language ad because she is a recognizable face in the community, Ms. Feldman said.

“She comes across as imparting information in a down-to-earth way,” Ms. Feldman said. “When we showed this to women in our research, they really wanted that.”

Having a nonjudgmental tone was important, Ms. Feldman said, since “there’s people that are watching our spots that want to be pregnant and there’s people that don’t want to be pregnant.”

In addition to the television ads, the company will introduce a microsite, TheFirstResponseDifference.com, that will include coupons, frequently asked questions about pregnancy and ovulation and additional product information.

The Breakfast Meeting: The Tech Industry Looks to Online Gambling and Business Insider Appoints an Executive Editor

Developers across the technology industry are focusing on online gambling as their next billion-dollar business, David Streitfeld reports. Online poker and sports betting are certainly nothing new, but developers from giants like Zynga to specialists like Betable are creating more casual games on which users can bet, from casino staples like slots and roulette to considerably more creative diversions. Developers are currently aiming their products at foreign markets while trying to make inroads in the United States, where online gambling is still largely illegal. Legislation to legalize the practice is slow, facing headwinds from brick-and-mortar casinos and traditional antigambling factions.

Business Insider, the nearly six-year-old online news site, has named Joe Weisenthal, the site’s lead financial blogger, as its executive editor. Mr. Weisenthal, who begins his day at 4 a.m. and maintainsa frenetic Twitter presence, was an obvious choice for the position because of his nervous energy and obvious love of his subject matter, Brian Stelter writes. Henry Blodget, who founded the site and remains its editor in chief, said the Business Insider will turn a meaningful profit during this quarter.

One reporter’s decision to authenticate an amateurish iPhone photo of an exploding manhole in Omaha involved shoe leather, not photo analytics or a careful examination of metadata, David Carr writes. Matthew Hansen, a columnist at the Omaha World-Herald, eventually traced the photo to Stephanie Sands, a graduate student the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and got a column out of it. The story may! not be a scoop for the ages, but it does reinforce the point that local newspapers still play an interesting role even in the digital age and that reporters generally benefit from turning off their computers and physically exploring a story.

Winners of the 2012 George Polk Awards uncovered corruption at the highest levels of the Chinese government, exposed abuses at New Jersey’s halfway houses and delved deep into the Syrian civil war, Marc Santora reports. The New York Times won three awards and Bloomberg News won two, and other winners included California Watch, CBS News, Frontline, GlobalPost, The Maine Sunday Telegram, McClatchy Newspapers, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The New Yorker and The Washington Post.

The death of a high-profile character on the season finale of “Downton Abbey” may have left fans of the show angry and mourning, but killing off charactersgenerally fails to alienate audiences, Bill Carter writes. (Fans, have no fear of spoilers â€" specifics will appear in the interview description below.) Important deaths have played a part in shows from “M*A*S*H” to “Dallas,” but now audiences use social media to protest more vociferously than they could in the past, as the creators of shows like “Lost” and even “Boardwalk Empire” have found. Both shows remained popular despite an outpouring of outrage.

Julian Fellowes, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and the creator and writer of PBS smash “Downton Abbey,” sat down for a spoiler-laden interview with Dave Itzkoff about the comings and goings on “Abbey” and his own possible departure from the show. (Read no further if you’re! catching! up.) The deaths of Sybil and Matthew, Mr. Fellowes revealed, were not necessarily his choice â€" the actors playing those characters decided to leave the show to pursue other opportunities. Mr. Fellowes would say little about the next season, except that one of the main themes will be the rebuilding of Mary. He is working on a possible period drama for NBC called “The Gilded Age” which, if it is picked up, would mean he would leave “Abbey.” As much as Mr. Fellowes would like to end the hit on his own terms, “the business of life is learning that you can’t lay down the terms,” he said.