A favourable in-house response to a new series of television commercials starring Ford chairman and chief executive William Clay Ford Jr has prompted the giant car maker to prepare additional TV spots featuring Henry Ford#;s great grandson, the Detroit News said.
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The newspaper, citing Ford insiders, said the new ads, expected to screen by mid-year, will be more product-oriented than the four image-oriented commercials that appeared this week.
While declining to offer specifics on the new campaign, Rich Stoddart, marketing communications manager for Ford Division, told the Detroit News: “We are certainly working on some new things.”
Feedback from employees and dealers on the current TV spots has been overwhelmingly positive, Stoddart added.
“The internal response has been nothing short of dramatic,” he told the newspaper.
Stoddart told the Detroit News that it was too early to gauge the buying public’s response to the current series of nostalgic ads fronted by the Ford chairman but added that early anecdotal evidence looked good.
A print campaign complementing the current TV spots will begin appearing in newspapers and magazines next week, the newspaper said.
The Detroit News said that the second wave of Bill Ford TV commercials were likely to focus on specific cars and trucks, such as the Mustang coupe or F-150 pickup.
The newspaper said that Bill Ford, who replaced Jacques Nasser as CEO in January, reluctantly agreed to appear in the commercials to help rehabilitate the image of the vehicle maker, which lost $US5.45 billion last year, suffered quality problems and became the target of lawsuits from its own employees.
But Ford’s dealers, a difficult group to please, are thrilled that Bill Ford has become the company’s public face, the Detroit News said.
