Ford Truck No-Nonsense Advertising – Brand Marketing at its best

in Brands / Copywriting / General by DGR Communications January 19, 2011July 2, 2014

I’ve been thinking about the Ford pick-up truck commercials over the last few months, you know the ones with the Dennis Leary (Rescue Me) voice-overs. Here’s the latest one to refresh your memory, or if you live outside of the US/Canada and don’t get these trucks, to know what I’m talking about…

We talk a lot about brand marketing when developing websites for our clients here at DGR Communications, and this is an example of brand marketing done very well. Why?

Well, I don’t have all the particulars of the campaign from Ford, but from the outside looking in, it appears to be spot on for the target audience that they are looking to sell their trucks to. In years gone by, during our time in advertising and marketing agencies, I used to work on the Honda brand and Ginnie used to work on Hyundai, so we have some insight into this marketplace. Knowing your audience is vital to the success of any marketing activity whether it is producing a megabucks TV campaign for Ford in Detroit, or a small business website for a Phoenix start-up.

The overall tone, style and design of the ad, and the campaign as a whole, speaks directly to the blue collar, NFL loving, Budweiser drinking middle American man; these are the guys that buy trucks. The strong angular graphics, the cool male-biased colors, the drums & guitar heavy rock music soundtrack playing behind the rough and ready tones of Dennis Leary’s aggressive style of voice-over, even the use of a strong capitalized font is masculine. This is not an ad directed at housewives or soccer moms, this is no-nonsense, straightforward, get to the point and move on advertising for the man with a lot on his plate!

The language is also very bold and male oriented; the copywriter certainly did not moonlight as a scriptwriter on the Sex & the City movies! No BS, these are the facts you want to know…’the most…’, ‘the best…’ – ‘we don’t need a bunch of donut-eaters to tell us…’ (even though I can almost guarantee that this campaign went through a number of focus groups!), rounding off with ‘chew on that!’

Put that package together with appropriate media buying in NFL spots, sports channels and other male dominated programs (I certainly see it a lot) and you can see why this campaign is effective, and continues to keep Ford F- Series trucks as the best selling truck in America.