… and they should, even if it’s about a terrible football team in an outer suburb.
Have a look at this …
How good is that?
No corporate, bland, fake-aspirational rubbish here … nope, just the sort of language a West Ham supporting, Dagenham-residing away-ground visiting fan would spout to their mates day in and day out.
Hell, it even talks about another brand [Persil], cheating the system, pub crawls, beer, alternative transport, violence and derogatory names for the are they come from. [Dagenham dustbin]
All this in a car ad. It’s amazing.
Given we live in an age where data is supposed to be able to tell us everything we need to know about a specific audience so we can create highly targeted communication just for them, this ad is more targeted than anything I’ve seen recently. And there’s two reasons for that …
The first is they acknowledge the role of the car is to transport people to-and-from locations. They don’t claim – as is the current fashion – that owning that car should be considered the pinnacle of their existence and achievements, it is simply a great way to go on journey’s to destinations where something they love takes place.
Refreshing.
The second is because instead of speaking in current favoured style of ‘corporate faceless brand to generic, middle-of-the-road, mass market audience who all aspire to live the same generic, bland aspirational lifestyle as one another’ … this speaks in the voice of ‘travelling footie fan to travelling footie fan’.
Our industry likes to talk a lot about authenticity, but it seems we have forgotten what that actually means.
This ad works because it speaks in the voice of where the car was [then] made and who [then] made the car.
Dagenham.
A proud, working class town where West Ham football club was the central pillar that fed the dreams, community and escape for the area … which is why even the endline, ‘spirit of the terraces’ is brilliant.
Of course it’s too ‘bloke’ focused and linking driving and drinking is never a smart thing to do – let alone the ‘service station fracas’ but when I – a Nottingham Forest supporting, West Ham hating bloke – see that ad, I feel something … imagine something … and that’s far more than I can say for most car advertising I’m exposed to these days.
And while the Ford Cortina was always designed to be a working class wagon, this ad makes it aspirational.
Not in terms of promising you a faceless, sophisticated life of beige bland … but because it owns who it is and is proud of it.
As I wrote a while back, when you own who you are, not only does it mean no one can own you, but you find you attract rather than have to continually chase.
Given the standard of current Ford ad, maybe they could do with going back to Dagenham.