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Your support makes all the difference.Ford's advertising was considered for many years to be lowest common denominator advertising - just shots of the car driving along, with the tagline "The new Ford X, Y or Z". They've always had a really big budget, but in more recent times they've got better hold of it, and their advertising has become quite extraordinary.
The Fiesta is a rather unglamorous little car and potentially very dull, though it is the best-selling car in Britain. And the great temptation, when something is selling very well, is to leave addressing it until it's no longer selling well - by which time it's often too late.
But these ads are timely, daring, witty and sparky. There are twelve 20-second commercials in all, each showing a person's face and connecting a detail of it to a feature of the car. One features a woman with big glasses, whose eyes we see moving behind the frames, and this is related to the car's mobile headlamps. Another has a man jumping on a trampoline, to demonstrate that the car's hydraulic clutch is "lighter on your feet".
And the best one has a baby's face rapidly changing into an old man's face to illustrate the short time the car takes to get from 0 to 60 mph, which is especially charming.
There is a lot of advertising out there - for jeans, sports shoes, beers - that requires great skill for it to succeed, but to have created such charming, interesting and noticeable stuff as this is an enormous achievement. The agency has made the client's money work extremely well.
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