• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 10, 2010

If Google TV was up and running, it would become the perfect extension of Ford's sponsorship for the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival set to stream live on YouTube from Tennessee beginning Friday, Scott Kelly, digital marketing manager at Ford, told MediaPost.

YouTube worked with media agency Team Detroit and partner Ford to integrate the campaign on a variety of Google properties. Ford's campaign stretches across mobile, search marketing, YouTube display inventory, and contextually targeted ads on the Google Content network. The campaign aims to drive traffic to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival's home page on YouTube, where concert promoter Superfly has agreed to allow the music to stream live.

The live stream from the music festival in Tennessee begins Friday and runs through Sunday. It is part of YouTube's commitment to help brands like Ford reach larger audiences and grant people access to great music content. Music fans will have an opportunity to watch Jay-Z, the Dave Matthews Band, Damian Marley & Nas, The National, Regina Spektor, Julia Nunes, Spearhead, The Dead Weather, Norah Jones, John Butler Trio, Zac Brown Band, and Carolina Chocolate Drops from the their laptop or hook that PC up to their big-screen TV through a HDMI cable.

Ford spends about 25% of its overall advertising budget on digital and emerging media. The automaker has made a fundamental shift to become agnostic when it comes to distributing video across channels as video on PCs, mobile handsets and TVs begin to blend. "As we get more channels, it's less of a shift of media and more or a need for incremental media," Kelly says. "Media consumption is rising and we will need to be in both places, on video sites like YouTube and traditional television."

Music from the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival will become available for download onto the iPhone or handsets running the Android operating system. YouTube mobile will allow consumers to stream on demand the tunes from artists who performed at the concert and play the music through Ford's Sync entertainment console in the car.

"It's very efficient to think we can go to Google and be on all these different channels," Kelly says.

The band Dawes, traveling in a Ford Fiesta to Bonnaroo, cut a series of videos around their journey to the festival as they stop to play at other locations. The series, titled "The Road to Bonnaroo," provides marketing for Ford, explains Dana Vetter, manager of music marketing programs at YouTube. The videos highlight the band's music. A lower-third provides a link to AmazonMP3 and iTunes to purchase the music.

The campaign began about a week before the concert to push people to the live stream. A mobile takeover on YouTube will occur on June 19.