Ford, which is sponsoring the singer’s summer tour, has aligned itself with Kelly Clarkson and is using her new song, Go, in a JWT Detroit-created :60. The campaign marks the switch from the company’s old tagline. “Built for the road ahead” to the new and relatively meaningless tagline, “Bold moves.”
There ought to be a rule for taglines. They ought to actually mean something and not be so bland they can be slapped on any brand interchangeably. “Bold moves”? I mean WTF? Are we talking about Bold detergent moving stains out of a shirt? OK, maybe Ford is makming some bold moves here but this tagline is about as descriptive as Intel’s lame switch to “Leap Ahead” which sounds like some descriptor for a kangaroo daylight savings time convention. Seems Ford and JWT caught the boardroom brand blather disease.
If you’ve ever been part of a brand development team or sat in on a brand development meeting when the agency gets all “vision, mission, essence, position” and throws up all these descriptive words and phrases on the white board, you’ll love the new website because JWT took all those words and threw them up all over the website in some sort of effort to bring meaning to the tagline. If you spend enough time on the website, you’ll be brainwashed as if you were right there in all those brand development meetings drinking the Kool Aid. So, I guess this campaign’s sledge hammer approach just might work after all.
