Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…. the fictional Lone Ranger has nothing on the real events depicted in the movie Ford v Ferrari. It stars Christian Bale as Ken Miles and Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby.
If you haven’t seen it yet, go now… it’s great fun. It tells the story of Henry Ford II and his quest to defeat Ferrari and prove Ford doesn’t “just make fat cars.” The media coverage has been massive, and it’s being touted as a sure Oscar winner. Talk about publicity. Wow!
Just out of curiosity, what is having the FORD name on billboards, on TV and in the movies worth to the Ford and Shelby brands? Turns out there‘s an app for that. Entertainment Resources & Marketing Association (E.R.M.A.), located in lovely Palm Desert CA, keeps track of such things. If you want star X to be seen carrying/wearing/drinking your brand, this is Who Ya Gonna Call.
What started out as product placement, where a can of Coke appears in a camera shot, has now grown to where Steve McQueen always drives a Bullitt Mustang, James Bond always drives an Aston Martin, while wearing a Rolex, and drinking Bollinger champagne.
Partying with Edsel Ford II and Aaron Shelby
E.R.M.A. was no help with my question, but I have some friends in the marketing business, so I thought I’d see if they could help me put a number on this kind of exposure for the Ford and Shelby brand.
Modern day marketing seems to be full of fun terms such as:
BRAND AWARENESS
MEDIA EXPOSURE
NAME RECOGNISION
SOCIO METRIC STATUS
ETC. ETC.
Companies pay BIG BUCKS to get their names in front of their target market. (Stay with me, we’ve got a lot more ad speak ahead.) A second of screen time or a glance at a billboard, multiplied by the number of viewers, is used as justification for spending the bucks.
F v F opened with a $37,000,000 weekend box office in the U.S. (52.4 mill globally). For ease of calculation, we’ll use a $10 ticket price. That’s 3.7 million U.S. buyers looking at the names Ford and Shelby for 2 ½ hours. And it didn’t cost either of them a dime! In marketing lingo that’s brand awareness … with a turbo.
The main narrative is Ford vs Ferrari, but the subplot is Shelby vs the Ford bureaucracy. So maybe not everyone will leave with a positive impression of Ford. Don’t worry. My friend Shelby once said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Or was that P. T. Barnum …. no matter, same difference.
Next, let’s look at demographics. Reuters said 80% of F v F ticket buyers were males over the age of 25 (talk about hitting your prime market !) and audiences rated the film a rare A+. That could drive sales! We’ll break those males down by income in a few moments.
How about political awareness (correctness)? NEW YORKER magazine, that paragon of hipness said, “This is definitely a Boys Will Be Boys movie. It’s a film about male pride, insults resulting in fights, and a bewildering rarity: the non-sappy happy family. Ken’s wife reads Better Living while watching her husband engaged in a fist fight.“ Oh well, they thought it was beautifully filmed though, so I guess that’s something.
The P. C. score is in the dumper. None of us could decide if that will help or hurt potential sales.
I love this one: socio metric status. Basically this is the respect and admiration of your peers. Once all our material needs are met, we adopt products and symbols to indicate our membership in a group, and our status within that group. With all the attention this movie is receiving, if you’re a Ford guy, or a Shelby guy, you may gain new respect from the masses and your peers. Or at least that’s the theory.
If you own a branded Shelby product you will receive extra adulation. Shelby put his name on all kinds of stuff, from cars to pickup trucks, to bicycles, to an underarm deodorant named Pit Stop — great name! And of course to a beer, and being a Texan Ol’ Shel also has his own chili seasoning, available, believe it or not, right now at your local grocery store.
Slipping deeper into this Orwellian Rabbit Hole, there is something called a Dunbar’s Number, which quantifies how many people you know (Facebook?) and how likely you are to influence them. If you paid for the movie with a credit card, or better yet a movie discount card, the big advertisers know who you are, your occupation, spending habits and amounts, where you live, the approximate worth of your home based on your neighborhood (Zillow?). That and other factors determine whether or not you are a “thought leader” and an “influencer.” The more likely you are to be either of these, the higher your number, and the more your contact information will sell for. Expect to be getting sales flyers from local car dealers or an invitation to a special event.
Most of my friends know I’m full of chili byproduct, and I will have zero to negative influence on any of them.
Bottom line, none of us dared put a dollar value on all this media exposure and brand awareness, but it’s gotta be worth a TON! Way more than even a multi-billion dollar car company could afford to buy.
Here’s hoping my friends at Ford and Shelby have to get bigger shoe boxes to store all their money .
ME AND SHEL WITH THE DAYTONA COUPE*
Weren’t those far-out fashions groovy?
Lynn Park photo
Having known Shel since the early days, and owned and driven a few of his cars, it’s nice to see that era come back into the collective consciousness. Nobody wants to hear an old f – – – rambling on about those were the days. But this movie does, and does it much better than I ever could. Yea, those were great times. I’m glad I was there!
Footnote: This was taken in 1976, at the first Shelby American Auto Club (SAAC) convention in Oakland CA. Shel had spent the entire afternoon in the parking lot autographing cars, and he was resting in the shade (this was pre-transplant). I got a moment to ask him if he’d read the interview with Pete Brock I wrote, which SAAC published in one of their first quarterlies, then just a pamphlet. I ‘d spent most of a day riding around with Pete picking up parts for his hang gliders with a portable recorder and a mic hanging on the rear view mirror. Shel said “I LOVED IT” got out of his chair, walked past the rope protecting the Coupe, posed the picture and had Lynn Park take the shot. Lynn sent me an 8 X 10 later. It’s one of my most precious moments.