Born Social harnessed hatred and plausible absurdity to help Ford reach a new audience with its first social media car reveal in Europe.
The campaign to promote the Ford Capri, an electric sport utility vehicle, took place during the 2024 UEFA European Football championship and featured former footballer Eric Cantona. And also a goat.
Ford’s new Capri had none of the muscle-car styling of the old model, but the automaker hoped it would evoke the same sense of excitement and rebelliousness in people, and win over the drivers who thought electric vehicles (EVs) were dull and passionless.
It was with this challenge in mind that Wieden+Kennedy London developed the creative positioning for the new Capri — Mischief Rewired — which conveyed the idea of updating a mischievous legend from the past.
Born Social was given the brief to unveil the new Capri on social media in the summer, ahead of the TV spots that were scheduled to run from December of 2024.
‘We were tasked with generating reach and buzz and earned media, to get people excited about what was coming,’ says Will Menko, a strategy director at Born Social, ‘and the best way to do that is through social.
‘The reason Ford appointed us was that we’ve demonstrated you can build brands through social,’ he adds. ‘It’s the number-one channel in people’s lives, where they spend the most time and, for better or worse, it’s the driver of culture and conversation now.’
Social media is constant, too, says Menko, ‘and because it’s always-on, we have the capability to tell multiple stories and start lots of little fires. [Advertising] is no longer about one-off executions, it’s about building ecosystems of content in the channels that people know and love, and then building the brand from the ground up.’
Menko also dismisses the idea that only prestige channels — TV, cinema, etc — can nurture the kind of trust and desire required to get people to part with large sums of money for a product or service.
‘Just look at who’s doing [social media] best,’ he says, ‘It’s the luxury brands. Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Burberry — they all invested in social-first strategies over 10 years ago.’
The gnarliest challenge presented by the Capri campaign, says Menko, was introducing the automaker to new audiences. Ford has, for the most part, always been a car for everyday people, but EVs are 20%–30% more expensive than their internal combustion engine equivalents.
Which means that ‘the people who know and love Ford are arguably priced out of the new vehicles,’ says Menko. ‘So, we had to drive fame and talkability beyond our existing audience, not just to launch these new cars but to reposition the brand — because if you had £40,000–£60,000 to drop on a new car, you probably weren’t thinking about Ford.’
Nor was there much low-hanging fruit left in the EV market for Ford to pluck. According to Menko, 20% of new cars bought in Europe are electric, meaning that most of the tech-obsessed and eco-conscious buyers were already spoken for.
‘We needed to appeal to the more affluent mainstream, and for those people, sustainability alone wasn’t going to cut it,’ says Menko, adding that ‘there were 27 EV launches in 2024. And where there’s parity, you’ve got to aim for the heart to go broad.’
Building on the ‘Mischief Rewired’ positioning, Born Social built its launch strategy around four content pillars: harness the hate, inject moments of mischief, rewire legends, and fuel nostalgia.
Five years previously, in the US, Ford had unveiled its Mustang Mach-E, which was, just like the Capri, an electric SUV based on a classic muscle car, and to this day there are people who maintain that it does not deserve the Mustang name. So, Menko and his team knew to expect some complaints about the design of the new Capri. But they also knew that 80% of Mach-E owners were new to Ford, which suggested that backlash was not necessarily a problem. So they decided to embrace and cultivate the hatred directed at the Capri, and use it to boost the reach of the campaign.
Injecting moments of mischief was a nod to the old Capri’s pop-culture image as a stunt or getaway car, and it was how the campaign would communicate the idea of an EV with swagger and character, and the campaign invoked nostalgia by borrowing aesthetics from the vehicle’s 1970s heyday.
Cantona, meanwhile, was chosen as the ideal spokesman to represent a rewired legend, says Menko. The former footballer has always had a strong personality, and he has stayed in the public eye since he retired from the game by reinventing himself as an actor and singer. Cantona was also a natural fit for a Europe-wide campaign that aimed to capitalise on the conversation around a football tournament.
Born Social planned the execution of the campaign around four stages — spotted, leaked, caught and revealed — to encourage people to talk about and share the content.
‘I guess you can call it a Hansel and Gretel strategy,’ says Menko. ‘We placed a trail of bread crumbs and Easter eggs across the internet via creators, influencers and meme accounts to drive hype and [inculcate] a sense of “what the fuck is going on here?”’
It began with a clip of Cantona being approached by EmanRTM for one of the latter’s street-interview videos, and offering a cryptic response to one of the YouTube creator’s questions before walking off with a goat in tow.
‘We know how the internet and the rumour mill works,’ says Menko. ‘People want shareable, plausible but also entertaining content that suspends disbelief, and when they share it, they’re joining in on the joke.
‘Eric Cantona being spotted walking down the street in London with a goat by our creator. Is that plausible? Yes. Is it absurd? Yes. Is it shareable? Yes.’
Cantona took part in other stunts designed to engineer virality in that way over the course of the campaign. For example, he appeared on The Rest Is Football podcast and walked off after offering another cryptic answer to a question, the clip of which was seeded on social media.
At the beginning of the campaign, Born Social focused on YouTube, TikTok and Reddit — a platform people often visit to vent their hatred of things — where Cantona (or someone acting on his behalf) did an Ask Me Anything interview which, according to Menko, outperformed all of the platform’s benchmark metrics.
In the latter stages of the campaign, the content became more polished and less cryptic, and Born Social began to use Instagram and Facebook more to spread the message, as well as paid social, and working with WPP’s Burson on PR.
‘We wanted a good spread across five or six social channels,’ says Menko. ‘The figures that came back were that we generated over a billion in earned reach — that’s Ford’s most successful EV launch ever.
‘In the first week alone, after the Eric Cantona reveal film dropped, there were 1,400 articles written across Europe that had a reach of 365 million. Earned social — conversation that was happening beyond our own channels — generated over 425 million in reach, we got 4.6 million creative views, three million organic impressions, and paid media delivered an additional 50 million impressions.
‘So, you can engineer virality. You just have to do it with content that is plausible and authentic — by choosing creators who bring it to life in a way that’s authentic to them and their channel — and by taking people on an entertaining journey.
‘Of course, a 30-second TV spot can suspend your disbelief and move you, but it’s not a two-way conversation. What we did here was to build hype and talkability, to ultimately drive fame for the Capri.’
Correction 5.3.25: An earlier version of this article said the Mischief Rewired campaign was the first time that Ford had launched a new car on social media, it was, in fact, Ford of Europe’s first social-first reveal.
