• by Karl Greenberg , October 4, 2010

Ford's forthcoming reality-show campaign for the 2012 Focus resembles its prior Fiesta Movement campaign in some respects: it features people with big social media skills and fan bases, lots of challenges, and of course, the cars. But there are big differences.

Instead of unrolling over the course of several months, the effort, "Focus Rally: America," will happen over five weeks in early 2011. If the program also resembles CBS' "The Amazing Race" reality show, it's because the program was co-developed by Elise Doganieri, who created the CBS program with Bertram van Munster.

Ford and the producers will cast the six teams of two each from online applications and a national casting call in 11 cities this fall, with the provision that applicants have to be social media mavens arriving with their own virtual Rolodex of fans, friends and followers.

The teams will compete against each other to complete tasks in a cross-country road trip. While they scramble to complete assignments, their travails and adventures will run in long- and short-form webisodes on Hulu five times a week. There will also be real-time daily dispatches from the Focuses and participants in the races will be tasked with uploading additional content to their own blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites. Ford has also launched a Web site of its own FocusRally.com, dedicated to the race, which will host video content as well.

Ford is letting people apply through mid-November at the Focus Rally Web site, which entails uploading a video explaining why one would be the ideal candidate for the show. Ford is also holding auditions for the show in 11 cities: Los Angeles, Tampa, Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Houston, Orlando and Las Vegas.

"The Fiesta Movement campaign was a big influence on us because we learned [about] the real power of social networks and consumer-generated content," says Jeff Eggen, Ford's experiential marketing manager. "But we wanted to develop a program for Focus, taking those learnings and harnessing the power of user-generated content, social networks and making it bigger."

He says the genesis of the idea was to merge Doganieri's company's expertise in reality content with "what we do well: taking a car and matching it with a socially vibrant group of people who can tell a story in their own words."

He says another big difference is the play-at-home aspect of the Focus Rally: fans of teams can help them by texting, calling, or emailing information to their cars.

"Fans might get the next location where the drivers must go," Doganieri tells Marketing Daily. "Online, we might say that tomorrow your favorite team or car will be in such-and-such a town. That allows us to spotlight new [telematics] features in the Focus."

Eggen says the idea is to create a community around each team. He explains that if, for example, a team knows it will be going to a particular city, it can reach out to fans and get help because one of the fans might be an expert on that region, or live there. "They can even meet them in person," he says.

Doganieri says people auditioning at the casting events will have three minutes in front of a camera to talk about why they want to be in the rally, why they think they can generate support or help from fans, "and they have to have really good personalities. A good sense of humor is important too," she says.

The Focus Rally will get much more traditional-media support than did the Fiesta Movement campaign. "We have to reach a mass audience with this because it can't build over a seven-month period like Fiesta Movement. It's only five weeks, so we will use lots of partnerships already in place to link in with Focus Rally: America. We will use ad time in traditional media to drive traffic and awareness because we want people to watch who don't normally don't watch Hulu."