While Ford’s lineup of vehicles today is incredibly progressive, brand perceptions and favourable opinion have lagged with millennials who still see the brand as traditional. As a result, Ford is not attracting its fair share of millennials to fuel future success in the highly competitive automotive category.

With sustainability being a key consumer trend across all industries, we wanted to leverage Ford’s sustainability innovations in marketing communications to win the hearts and minds of millennial consumers.

The primary objective of this campaign was to elevate brand perceptions amongst millennials, a priority focus audience for Ford. Success would be measured by a YouTube brand lift study that would be employed to track any potential lifts in brand favourability in response to the hero film we would be creating for this campaign. To gauge millennial consideration for the Ford brand, we also measured millennial web traffic to the Ford site.

With environmental issues regularly topping the list of concerns most dear to our millennial target, we sought to highlight Ford’s sustainability innovations in a way that was more inspiring than boring carbon reduction pledges and sappy manifesto videos extolling nature’s beauty.

We believed that sharing Ford’s innovations in sustainable manufacturing, would be the sort of messaging that would resonate with them. Ford has been a pioneer in upcycling bio materials like coconut, rice and soy into vehicle parts such as trunk mats, electrical brackets and cushy seats which are found in many Fords today.

So instead of blending in like all other brands, we just blended.

We created the Ford Smoothie which featured many of the same sustainable ingredients found in Ford vehicles today, and invited people to order the first Ford you can drink instead of drive, on Uber Eats.

Our target was made up of millennial consumers with a progressive outlook on life, including a deep reverence for the environment and a belief for practicing ethical consumerism. This millennial consumer is twice as likely to say they are "prepared to make lifestyle compromises to benefit the environment" and "do their best to shop ethically and responsibly".

Our approach to marketing the Ford Smoothie was to market it just like a modern organic juice brand.

We developed an integrated campaign led by a quirky long-form animated film, promoted the smoothie on social, supported it with interactive wild postings in trendy neighbourhoods, and recruited a few foodie, fitness and sustainability influencers to spread the word. And most importantly, we invited people to order the first Ford you can drink instead of drive, on Uber Eats.

Our campaign was executed in a three-phased approach:

Inspire

This phase would focus on inspiring consumers with compelling content that brought our sustainability innovations to life. Key executions included interactive wild postings as well as an animated long form film promoted on social and OLV channels.

Inform

This phase would be focused on deeper education of our sustainability initiatives by highlighting the range of sustainable materials Ford uses, specific vehicles that incorporate these transformed parts, as well as additional sustainability commitments. The key execution was the campaign landing page promoted on social and through digital publication partners.

Invite

Now that consumers were inspired with our content, and were educated about our sustainability initiatives, we wanted to entice people to order the smoothie. The key executions being social content from our partner influencers who drove their audiences to Uber Eats where they could order the Ford smoothie for themselves.

The results? The campaign delivered 60 million impressions across all touchpoints which increased Ford brand favourability with millennials by 8.4% (nearly 3x Google’s benchmarks). Ford also saw a 300% increase in Google search queries in sustainability related search terms. Additionally, Millennial share of web traffic was also up 46% on our Smoothie campaign page vs overall Ford.ca traffic. Above and beyond creating the tastiest Ford ever and effectively selling out of Ford Smoothies in the process, we helped a whole new generation of people who don’t really care about vehicles, or vehicle ads, see Ford in a totally new way.