Ford’s “Fiesta Movement”

Ford has an excellent interactive campaign up and running for the 2010 Fiesta — called the “Fiesta Movement”. Ford is asking “Millennials” to submit videos pitching themselves as tester/bloggers for the new Fiesta (which won’t launch for a year). They’ll give the winning entrants a Fiesta for six months, asking them to post videos to all their social media platforms and to Ford’s Fiesta Movement microsite.

What’s great is Ford is reaching out to influentials among their target looking for feedback — although it’s not clear how much they can alter the design of the car before releasing it in a year. Car companies, particularly American ones, are notoriously slow to institute design changes.

Mediapost talked to Sam De La Garza (“SDLG”), Ford’s small car marketing manager, and Scott Monty (“SM”), manager of digital and multimedia communications, about how they were picking winners. Their answers reflect significant social media culture consciousness:

“Q: How do you decide on who these 100 “agents” are who get the Fiesta for six months?

“SM: Part of it is their demonstrated enthusiasm for and interest in the program, to see if they are into the whole thing. Second is demonstrating that they have an online audience they can share it with. They may be regular folks who have blogs, would-be journalists or part-time auto bloggers.

“SDLG: I think as we see the caliber of people [applying], we have changed our ideas a bit on the fly. Our original thoughts were around trying to use filters and criteria like: “Do you have over 500 friends on Facebook?,” “Do you have over 1,000 followers on Twitter or 250,000 subscribers on YouTube?” But these are basic thresholds; the next step is seeing what type of “pull” they get from their application videos on YouTube, which shows they can be a valuable agent for us.”

So Ford is trying to develop new ways of interacting with their audience, the lack of which in my opinion (IMHO), was one of the contributing factors to Detroit getting it so wrong over the past number of years. Ever since the destruction of Detroit as a city, designers and marketers for the big American auto companies have worked out of distant suburban industrial parks without any real consumer connection or audience feedback.

In a geographical sense white flight killed designer’s interactions and instincts. This new campaign is another way to reconnect with their target and with America.

Technorati Tags: advertising, Facebook, Ford, marketing, Mediapost, Social Media, Twitter

A Blast From The Recent Past Via Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs simple but amazing 2005 Stanford commencement speech touched on issues that are very much alive today: getting fired, being poor, pursuing innovation, inventing the Mac, Windows, the Whole Earth Catalogue as the first Google, and his dictum, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. And discovering he had cancer and being told he had only months to live.

Transcript here.

Of special importance to me is his telling the story of learning calligraphy at Reed College (from the great Lloyd Reynalds, who I also studied under), and applying the art of calligraphy to the first Mac, which then “was copied by Windows.” From Jobs commencement speech:

“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

I wrote about calligraphy and Reed a while ago in a note on the internal Campfire Hub:

When I was in college at Reed (back before they invented the electric light bulb) there was an electrifying art history professor, Lloyd Reynolds. His class covered the history of art, education, what he called “significant gesture” in great art, Zen Buddhism — it was the first introduction I had to many of these subjects. The class was always mobbed and nearly impossible to get into, despite the fact that Reynolds was an incredible curmudgeon who would regularly attack his students as idiots.

The reason I bring this up is Reynolds was a world class calligrapher who insisted all his students buy an Osmoroid pen and learn Italic Cursive. For him intellectual work had to be intimately associated with craft and work.

For forty years (1948 on) Reynolds had every student at Reed writing in Italic cursive and talking about the drawings of William Blake. His lectures are still vivid in my memory. And among the digital luminaries he inspired are Steve Jobs, Howard Rheingold (Wired, etc.), Peter Norton (Norton Utilities), Sumner Stone (who for Adobe and then his own company developed many of the digital typefaces we use today), etc. Here are a couple quotes from a longer piece about Reynolds:

“The hands think,” said Reynolds. “The nervous system is continuous, so how can we say that the hands don’t think? Often the conscious mind merely interferes with the hand. Students learning to write reach a certain proficiency, and their eyes, like a police matron, take all the freedom away from the rhythmical movement. I tell them not to watch grimly because the eye is a cold judge that frustrates spontaneity. Let your hand move!

“To think that art has two parts, one intellectual and the other servile . . . no. It’s a false dichotomy, absolutely false. Universities from the Renaissance on have put criticism above work, above action. They claim that there is the thinking or philosophical man and the man of action—that the two cannot be in one person. This is one of the worst heresies in Western civilization. It accounts for much of the mess that we’re in, in colleges and universities, where if a work is rational and analytical, it’s respectable.”

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Calligraphy, Cancer, computers, google, Lloyd Reynolds, New Media, Peter Norton, Reed College, Stanford, Steve Jobs, Sumner Stone, Technology, Type, Whole Earth Catalogue, William Blake, Windows

Making the Creative Process More Social

As part of Social Media Week, Campfire will be hosting a lively conversation between Michael Galpert of Aviary and Scott Belsky of Behance today, Monday, Feb 9, at 5 pm. The discussion will be about the creative process and how to make it more social. Audience participation will be welcome so we hope you can attend.

The session runs from 5 pm to 7 pm and our address is 62 White Street, near Broadway, in TriBeCa..

Here’s a bit about our two participants:

Michael Galpert – Founder, Aviary. Michael is one of the founders of Aviary. He currently sits on the advisory board for Web 2.0 Expo New York, is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. He helps organize Barcamp New York and is actively involved with the NYC-based tech community group NextNY.

Scott Belsky – Founder, Behance. Scott has committed his professional life to help organize creative individuals, teams, and networks. Scott is the founder of Behance, a company that develops products and services that boost productivity in the Creative Professional Community.

Session info here

Technorati Tags: Campfire, social media

Fear and Advertising In Austin Texas

Attention People of Austin: Pack up the breakables and swaddle the children, Campfire is coming to town.

Specifically I’ve been invited to speak at this years SXSW Interactive Shindig. Course, speaking is so 2005, I thought we’d amp it up a bit and do something a little more in our gear. Kick out the jams so to speak.

The panel (and I use that term ever so loosely) is titled “You’re Living in Your Own Private Branded Entertainment Experience” It’s scheduled to all go down on March 16.

What’s it all about? I can’t tell you. Your mind would melt. But here’s a hint, I’m pretty sure Gorillas and madness fit in.

Who else is making this happen? Oh baby, I got the stellar cast lined up.
Brian Clark
Steve Peters
Lance Weiler
Dee Cook
and special guest appearances by others who’s names shall remain unspoken cause just knowing would BLOW YOUR EVER LOVING MIND!

So get your ass to Austin in March for this here thing. I promise a good surreal time shall be had by all.