Ford Plans a GlobalTV ‘Roadblock’

New Ad Will Run One Time Zone After Another

by Stuart Elliott, IHT, 28 October 1999

Turn on a TV set almost everywhere around the world at about 9 p.m. local time Monday, and chances are a Ford commercial will be on.

The reason? Ford Motor Co., in an unusual stunt, is buying an estimated $10 million of commercial time on dozens of national and pan-regional TV networks – 40 broadcast and cable channels in the United States alone – to run a single, two-minute spot.

(…) The ambitious effort by Ford to present the commercial to millions of people at the same hour- known in industry parlance as a roadblock – is emblematic of the extraordinary steps being taken by major marketers to stand out in a cacophonous, cluttered media landscape.

“One of the beauties of television is its massive, immediate reach,” said Jon Mandel, co-managing director of Mediacom Inc., in New York, an advertising agency owned by Grey Advertising Inc.

“But because there’s now a gazillion channels to watch, reach declines further and further,” Mr Handel added. “I’d call what Ford is doing pretty big.”

The emotional commercial is intended to help welcome the millennium and celebrate Ford customers for their diversity…There are scenes of people of various races and nationalities engaged in everyday activities: arguing with a lover, exercising, bidding a friend goodbye, sightseeing, dancing, working and, of course, watching TV.  All that loving, leaving and living – presente in an upbeat manner reminiscent of ‘It’s a Small World’ or “We Are the World”- takes place in the presence of Fords, vintage and contemporary.

(…) Though the spot is the first to include all the Fords brands, its purpose is less about selling cars and trucks than it is about burnishing Ford’s image. The goal: generate warm and fuzzy feelings about Ford as part of the mission of Jacques Nasser, the new chief executive, to have consumers perceive Ford as the world’s leading company for auto products and services.

(…) He added: “People know what Ford is, a big automobile manufacturer, but they don’t know who Ford is. They don’t know we’re a company with heart, soul, a passion for their lives.

Mr. Schroer predicted that the commercial would “reach a billion people, 300 million households, in one night.”

“It was a mammoth task to pull it all together,” said Ted Powell, international creative director on the Ford account at the Detroit office of J. Walter Thompson, a unit of WPP Group. “We’ve been working on it for 10 months, getting all the countries, all the satellite stations on board.”

(…) The commercial is to run without a narration or voice-over announcer. Miss Church will be heard singing the song …only in English. Carolyn Brown, a spokeswoman for Ford, attributed that to English being ‘the universal language’ as well as ‘the language of hour home base.”