The Ford Motor Company blog ads

So the Ford Motor Company (through a public relations firm I assume) is now dumping big bucks into the blogs.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the ad currently on the top of Kos and a large number of other blogs (look to the right of this entry).

I spent awhile going over Ford's "Bold Moves" site, a curious public opinion astroturf effort with one of America's largest companies behind it.  Ford's taken out expensive blog ads on sites across the political spectrum for this campaign, so I figured, being a "blog-savvy" person (whatever the fuck that means), I'd check it out.

Read more below the fold.

The site describes itself as follows:

Ford Bold Moves is a video documentary series that takes you inside Ford Motor Company as it attempts one of the largest corporate turnarounds in history. With candid interviews from Ford executives, employees, industry experts and even Ford detractors, Bold Moves approaches each segment from every angle and keeps asking the question: Will Ford succeed?

At present, the site consists of nine original short web-videos on Ford.  Production values are excellent for the videos, but when you've got the backing of a company that probably spends a million dollars a year on toilet paper, it's probably to be expected.

Ford and/or their public relations firm hired a the guy behind "The Rabbi Report" to run the Ford Bold Moves "Community Buzz" section. The guy behind the site is Mark Rabinowitz, who lives in New York City -- while he's doing a great job, maybe it would have made more sense to get someone from the American suburbs who drives constantly to talk about the "bold moves" of Ford.

Back to the videos.  Here's my uber-short summary of the so-far nine-part video series:

"We suck.  We sucked even harder in the 80s and 90s when we designed a bunch of crap that people didn't like.  Oh yea, our cars don't get noteworthy mileage and we're kinda destroying the environment -- sorry 'bout that one.  But wait, we just brought an 83-year-old man back to our company a la Weekend at Bernie's and he's known to every Medicare-eligable American as a builder of super-fast cars, so if we pimp the fuck out of our latest Mustang and make it faster than a Ferrari, everyone will love us again.  Yay!"

Enough cynicism -- I'll reserve final judgement until the rest of the videos become available on the site, but given what I've seen so far, I'm not optomistic.  While it's great Ford Motor Company is financially supporting the blogs, if the big "bold move" of Ford is to sell a small number of expensive super-fast gas guzzlers to wealthy folks who need a new toy, then Ford is in worse shape than I thought.