How Ford’s #FiestaMovement Drove 200 Million Views On YouTube From #Influencer Videos

[This is Part 2 in a series. See Part 1 in the series: Automotive #Influencers vs. TV Commercials on YouTube]

In 2013, the #FiestaMovement set out to create an entirely social media-driven campaign that included, in large part, YouTube videos. This was a re-launch of a campaign from several years earlier, but the 2013 version had a much greater impact. The company held a combination search/contest/audition where YouTubers and other social media influencers could apply, via a public submission on YouTube, to be one of 100 Ford Fiesta “agents.” Ford called it the first “entirely user-generated campaign.” The goal was to create value and humanize the Ford brand in an appropriate way for multiple audience segments.

One of the most important parts of the campaign happened before it even officially began. Before the ambassadors were even selected, hundreds of applicants created various YouTube audition/submission videos to try to qualify to participate in the contest. This brought in hundreds of thousands of views even before the contest began. Each of these YouTubers shared their entries with their own communities, who responded with enthusiasm in the form of views, comments, tweets, and other social sharing.

One example was a video called “The Ford Fiesta Movement: I Want In,” (12,000 views), in which comedian and gay vlogger R.J. Aguiar auditioned on his channel “TheNotAdam” with a video about why he’d be a great advocate, listed the credentials of his YouTube channel and social media footprint, and showed why he was hoping to replace his 1998 Toyota 4Runner.

While TheNotAdam didn’t make the final cut, Fiesta benefitted by his advocacy to his YouTube following. This was replicated many times over for the brand, before the finalists were even selected. This multi-tiered contest format has also worked in another YouTube category, namely beauty vloggers, with the NYX F.A.C.E. Awards campaign. The multi-tiered YouTube contest format ramps up much more enthusiasm and views over a longer period than the single-tiered contest, which is just one-and-done.

In the #FiestaMovement campaign, 100 finalists were eventually accepted as brand abassadors/agents. These brand ambassadors were given a Ford Fiesta for eight months with gas and insurance expenses included (plus a GoPro Hero3 for shooting their adventures). Each agent was given a selection of monthly challenges to choose from, in which they would make videos around a theme.

Ford then repurposed the content for TV, launching media buys on American Idol, the X Games and the Bonoaroo Music Festival, as well as well as buys across social media. While only some of the missions primarily featured the Fiesta, the car was the helpful tool the mostly millennial-aged ambassadors used to go on their adventures. In one example, the “eleventhgorgeous” beauty vloggers had a contest to see how many marshmallow Peeps they could eat while in the front seat of their Fiesta (90,000 views). Clearly, as ridiculous as this video is, the Ford Fiesta is demonstrated as a place where you can have fun adventures with friends and family.

Mystery Guitarman Joe Penna created an orchestra of musical instruments out of his car, resulting in a music video with 500,000 views.

Other missions were built around the hashtags #fitness, #style, #americanidol, #adventure, #gaming, #socialactivism, and #travel. One special live event, “#Tubeathon 2013 presented by What’s Trending and the Ford Fiesta Movement”, was a YouTube-only telethon-like show just before Christmas to raise money for worthy causes.

While many of these videos never got as many views as a single paid TrueView campaign have, the authentic audience engagement makes each of these views much more valuable. And in total, videos from these 100 agents, plus the videos from creators who tried but did not succeed, far outweighed the less-engaged viewers of standard paid TrueView campaigns.

Ford Fiesta was able to create earned media of 203 million views vs. 21 million views of Fiesta videos on its official channels. This was 5X that of the Chevrolet Sonic’s 38.7 million earned media views, most of which came from a single music video by YouTube super band OK Go. While that video was an exciting and entertainment accomplishment, it lacked the appeal of more than a hundred YouTube stars advocating for the Fiesta directly to their engaged audiences. By comparison,
during roughly the same period, the new model with the second-highest earned media excitement was the Range Rover Evoque, with 55.7 million views. The high-profile electric Nissan Leaf, by comparison, received only 17.3 million earned media views — still a huge number, but much less than the Ford Fiesta.

While the Fiesta was already a long-established model, it only began to receive serious earned media attention on YouTube as a result of the #FiestaMovement campaign — its views outside of the 2013 and 2009 campaigns were negligible.

Micro-Tailored Campaign

“The Fiesta agents comprised a diverse array of interest groups (e.g. fitness, fashion, car tech, music), each with significant social fanbases,” wrote Reed Immer on the Response Marketing blog. “Thus, the Ford Fiesta message was able to be micro-tailored on a large scale, far more so than a single agency could pull off… Some of the best Fiesta Movement content occurred outside of the monthly missions in the form of natural posts that showed how the Fiesta truly was an adventure-enabler for the agent, and not just promo-fodder. This was possible because the agents were given Fiestas for a long enough time to truly develop a relationship with the car (partly evidenced by how sad the agents were when they had to return the Fiestas to Ford).”

Tubefilter’s Sam Gutelle wrote that: “Instead of using creators as mouthpieces for canned blocks of corporate text, Ford is letting creators give the pitches most meaningful to them… What does Ford hope to accomplish? Essentially, it’s all about engagement. Large-scale campaigns can roll up the ‘likes’ counter, but it means little unless they are actually connecting to the consumers they hope to reach. Ford, instead, wants its viewers to actually support the brand message instead of just clicking a button, and that philosophy has the potential to be a powerful marketing tool.”

“How do you make Ford relevant to a group who doesn’t have the brand on their radar, and doesn’t respond to typical media?” asked TeamDetroit, the agency behind #FiestaMovement and Ford’s #OneTankAdventure campaign. “You tap into the audience of someone who already has their attention.”

Was it a success? Well, according to Connie Fontaine, then Ford’s brand content and alliances manager, “Never before has a group of car owners created such a sustained buzz for a new car.”

Check back for our next automotive article: “19 Best Practices for Automotive Creator Campaigns.”

Find Out For Yourself

Would you like to know how your brand can better engage with YouTube creators? Get a free audit of your brand footprint on YouTube by contacting us here.