• by Karl Greenberg , January 6, 2011

Ford is preparing to launch the "Focus Rally: America" social media/reality show hybrid that sends six teams of two across the country in the new Ford Focus.

Like the automaker's "Fiesta Movement" program that ran episodically over the course of several months starting in 2009 and prior to Fiesta's launch, the "Focus Rally: America" program will involve participants leveraging their social networks. Unlike Fiesta Movement, the program's window is only five weeks, and the participants weren't chosen solely for their social-media savvy and fan base.

They were also tapped for their personalities and chemistry with their prospective team members. And because of the limited window, the automaker will be taking to traditional media to get the word out about it, according to Jeff Eggen, Ford car experiential marketing manager.

"The whole Fiesta Movement program was sustained by social networks and the social vibrancy of the agents themselves, as well as earned media," he explains to Marketing Daily. "Fiesta Movement was all about a highly social and socially networked group of people," he says. "Focus Rally is really a hybrid -- reality TV with lots of interactivity -- so this program has a lot more traditional media elements to support it."

Eggen says Ford will promote the rally with digital media, integration with TV shows that Ford partners with, such as "Jimmy Kimmel Live," and traditional advertising. "We are doing it this way not only because it's not set up exclusively as a social-network program, but also because we don't have the luxury of taking seven months to build this; it has to go zero to sixty in a couple of seconds."

The show, produced by Ford and reality-show producer Elise Doganieri, launches on Hulu on Feb. 1. It will be hosted by World Cup and Olympic gold medal winner Jonny Moseley, who recently starred on the prime-time show "Skating with the Stars."

As part of the cross-country rally, the teams have to chase down clues in different cities and use their social networks as "life lines" to help them do it. The Focus Rally will air in episode form daily on Hulu and stream live in real time on FocusRally.com and social channels. The winning team gets a grand prize of $100,000, and both team members will receive a new 2012 Ford Focus.

The 12 participants, in six teams of two, are from different parts of the country and represent the Focus target demographic, per Eggen, who says the teams were culled from a pool of about 1,000 applicants. Team members are friends or co-workers and couples.

Among the teams of two is a young couple from Chicago -- the guy owns a bar, and the girl is a product development manager; a pair of account execs at an agency; a life coach and a lounge host; and a Brooklyn-based comedian and a director of student affairs. Eggen says a team of ten helped sift through the applicant pool with Doganieri's production company, which also produced CBS's "The Amazing Race" among other shows.

"They were the lead on the casting; they went out and did casting calls and filtered through all the videos we got. They are really good at spotting people who will be interesting, with chemistry between them. They have an intuition about what kind of things those people might do if they are together over a period of time. The bar is really high because we will be live streaming for two or three hours straight," says Eggen.