• by Karl Greenberg , September 14, 2009

Ford is putting marketing muscle behind NFL football on Fox this fall to promote one of its vehicles. That's not unusual. What is unusual is that the vehicle isn't a pickup truck or muscle car, but the new 2010 Taurus.

Lew Echlin, car marketing communications manager for Ford, says that while the F-150 has been featured in NFL ad pods since 2003, this year the Taurus will get "a substantially higher percentage of media [against the NFL] than we have done with cars in the past. This is the first year that a car is taking a dominant role in [Ford's NFL advertising]."

Among the programs for Taurus is the "Ford Drive One Fox NFL Sunday Pregame Show" -- within which, per Echlin, billboards will trumpet the virtues of Taurus and intros and out-tros for the pregame show will bear Taurus branding. Ford will also run its current trio of TV spots during pre-game and game ad pods. The ads highlight features like the programmable MyKey, Sync, Multi-Contour Seats with Active Motion and Ford's Blind Spot Information System.

Echlin says the 2010 Taurus, a vehicle that Ford has loaded with more bells and whistles than a Nob Hill trolley, indexes strongly with men who are looking for content more than an auto nameplate du jour. In fact, with its new ad campaign for Taurus, Ford has been busily positioning the car directly against luxury marques like Audi and Lexus, and the football campaign takes that further.

A new series of mini-ads on CBSSports.com show sports commentator James Brown doing a play-by-play style pitch for the car, which is shown on a football field against competitive vehicles in the luxury segment. Brown uses football terminology and stats to talk about the car's technology.

"An amazing find, which we identified through three different rounds of research, is that it was better for us to define our target customer not on what they are buying today but what they bought five years ago," says Echlin. "Five years ago these men may have bought a luxury car, or a large SUV. They are still looking for substance, but the economy has changed. You have seen a skew toward cars that is well over 50% of industry for the last several months."

Ford is also reprising a program it has used to promote the Ford Fusion and Fusion Hybrid by sponsoring Idol-finale house parties. The Ford Taurus Game Day House Party will comprise Taurus themed game-viewing parties at 1,000 households on Oct. 18, with the car on premises.

Ford is also title of Sports Illustrated's fantasy-football page on Facebook.

Echlin says Ford is not dropping the ball on programs touting Taurus to women via heavy integration in Martha Stewart's Living TV and magazine properties. And Echlin says that NFL notwithstanding, the largest portion of Ford's media buy against Taurus is in prime time.