Ford has launched "Swap My Ride," a secret stunt in which folks who had recently bought new cars from competitors traded them temporarily for Fords. The effort began running on television and online yesterday, a play on the similarly named MTV show, "Pimp My Ride." The commercials feature people who were asked to drive Fords for a week instead of the cars they had just purchased; Ford concealed its identity by creating a make-believe market research firm to conduct the effort, reported The NY Times story.
Ford is loading up the website FordChallenge.com with full-length interviews and blogs written by participants.
The "Swap My Ride" campaign is "an evolution from the Fusion and Ford Challenge," Whitney Drake, a Ford car communications manager, told the paper. "It’s about motivating people to learn more about our product and giving people the opportunity to drive it."
JWT has been filming the spots for the last eight weeks in Miami, LA, NYC and Dallas. The campaign will appear on a range of fall broadcast network shows, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" on ABC, and "Late Show With David Letterman" and "CSI" on CBS. The spots will also appear during National Football League games and on "Bones" on Fox.
On cable, the ads will run on USA, Lifetime and CNN, with the first appearing for eight weeks, the Times said. Online, the campaign will appear on websites of ESPN, Time, MSN, AOL and Yahoo. In print, the campaign will begin Friday in USA Today.
