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Ford Wants You to Take Your Kids On a Cross-Country Road Trip

If the idea of driving across the country with your kids makes you want to dig a burrow in the roots of a large tree and hide forever, Ford has something it would like you to see.

It may just convince you it isn’t actually the worst idea in history.

The new branded content campaign, called “The New Explorers,” is produced by automotive and action sports publisher TEN: The Enthusiast Network. TEN, which publishes Motor Trend and Automobile among other titles, has been ramping up its sponsored content production over the last year.

The campaign follows a family with two children, ages five and nine, as they take a five-week cross-country road trip in a 2016 Ford Explorer. With a bearded-artist dad and a yoga-pants-clad mom training for a marathon, the photogenic Collins family make perfect millennial aspirational avatars.

Rather than taking the shortest route from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine on interstate highways, the Collins' clan makes its way around the U.S. in smaller increments on back roads between out-of-the-way spots -- including plenty of off-road jaunts. Which, purely coincidentally, happen to highlight the Explorer’s capabilities in rough terrain with lots of visually pleasing sweeping exterior shots.

Hosted on GrindTV and Ford’s YouTube channel, the campaign also includes components on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, as well as native and custom placements on TEN’s own publishing sites. In addition to the branded content, there are four short videos touting the features of the Explorer’s Platinum model.

This summer, TEN debuted a half-hour online video for Toyota, produced in cooperation with Saatchi & Saatchi, following “Dirt Every Day” host Fred Williams as he drives a Toyota Tundra TRD Pro across the U.S., making stops in various extreme driving situations to show off its all-terrain, off-road cred.

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