Mustang Campaign 2017 – Ditch Regret
Mustang was launching for the first time in Australia and after discontinuing the Falcon, there was a lot riding on this nameplate to help create excitement for the brand and the car itself. The campaign needed to have attitude and be hard to ignore.
Insight
As we get older, we generally become more conservative, choosing sensible and practical over fun. Life becomes routine and predictable. But guess what? You only get one go round.
Idea
“Ditch Regret”
We positioned the Mustang as the exciting answer to the mundane aspects of peoples lives. Getting our audience to self-reflect and reconsider their boring choices in life.
Campaign Execution
The power of the campaign is driven by its contextuality. There were over 100 lines written for the campaign and each asset was paired with a line that matched to a contextually relevant media channel or physical location.
TVC
The TVC was designed to have the feeling of a movie trailer. We wanted to leave the viewer with a strong desire to see more of the car. This thinking formed a template, in which we limited each spot to 15 seconds, created a visual and audible build up, with a significant change of pace towards the end.
We had a total of 8 placements across Foxtel (an Australian subscription TV service), each with a unique line.
Directed by Bruce Hunt from Revolver.
Live AFL and Sports Entertainment Shows – “Don’t watch from the bench” (30″ TVC)
Binge Channel – Wentworth (TV Show) – “Where’s the drama in your life” (15″ TVC)
Generic Placement – “Someday isn’t a day of the week”
Binge Channel – Wentworth (TV Show) – “Bingeing can wait” (15″ TVC)
News Channels – “Is your life newsworthy?” (15″ TVC)
Gogglebox (TV Show) – “Stop watching people watching tv” (15″ TVC)
Nat Geo – “Craving some attention?” (15″ TVC)
Fox Sports – Don’t watch from the bench (15″ TVC)
Taboo (TV Show) – “Has excitement become taboo?” (15″ TVC)
AFL Stadium Screens – “Don’t just be a spectator” (15″ TVC)
OOH
Our OOH followed the same contextual premise as the TVC. We included lines that were contextual to the geo-location or to modern urban life. We had 12 lines across, Large OOH, Office Towers, Cafe Screens, Shoppa-lites, Cross Tracks and Mobile Billboards.
Is your life Groundhog Day? (3 X Consecutive Large Format OOH Placements on Bolte Bridge)
Waiting for a life or a ride? (Melbourne/Sydney Airport)
Rather be sitting in something else? (Punt Rd at peak hour)
Has your life become decaf? (Cafe Screens)
Why spend weekends looking for carparks? (Carparks in Melbourne)
We ran a remarketing Facebook campaign over 10 weeks, using 5 audience channels to contextual advertise to people based on their interests and usage of Facebook, as encouragement to push people to test drive. Depending on how they interacted with Facebook posts, users would be pushed to certain sections of the funnel, eventually driven to test drive the Mustang. We had a total of 4 channels working across 17 assets and lines using video and images.
Group A funnelled customers into the campaign, based on their behaviours using only our social video assets or pre-rolls.
Group B targeted customers depending on the time of day of their platform usage.
Group C focussed specifically on driving test drives.
Group D encouraged audience engagement.
Group E kept the customers excited about the Mustang through long form content.
Digital
Extending our digital campaign. We ran a selection of digital banners, HPTOs and Skins across a network of sites. We ran a tailored campaign for carsales.com.au, which targeting people who were searching for mundane and boring cars, like sedans and SUVs. And, as a first for Ford, we ran 3 extremely targeted banners with a service called GumGum, which allowed us to have animated banners appear under related images.
GumGum
GumGum was a platform we were trying for the first time, but it worked well and delivered higher CTR than standard OLA.
Our lines were contextual, based on the types of images we were targeting.
We used three lines:
“Do something worth gossiping about”, used across tabloid style news websites.
“Do you really want a sedan?”, used across images of sedans.
“Stop looking, start driving”, used across images of Mustangs.
Activation
Our final piece of the Mustang campaign is an activation at a house auctions in Melbourne and Sydney, designed to push the message, “Are you just watching or buying?”.
We partnered with an activation company to bring our idea to life, which saw a Mustang loudly arriving as the auction is about to start. The driver stops the car as people begin to mill about, and gets an A-Frame and places it at the front of the car. The auctioneer will then work our Mustang messaging into their pre-amble and help focus the attention on the car, before the bidding starts. And, as a consolation prize, the runner-up bidder gets the Mustang for the day.
