In a new slot, AdNews showcases the best in tactical advertising. This week's was one of the best stories in The Age yesterday, brought to you a day late, because that's when we get it delivered from Melbourne.
Page seven was a full ad from Blackmagic Design. 'Farewell Ford. Can we have some of your engineers and industrial designers?' asked the firm, before explaining what it does and the kind of people it wants to hire in an advertorial below. Not your average recruitment ad.
It juxtaposes a mid-seventies Ford Falcon muscle car - not dissimilar to Eric Bana's The Beast, or the legendary V8 Interceptor used in Mad Max I and II - and an award-winning digital camera made by the firm. It is a great newspaper ad because it is so simple, yet so effective. It's the first CEO Grant Petty had made.
“Nobody had said thank you to Ford for building cars here for 88 years. Where would Australian manufacturing be if they had not set up here?
“Everybody focuses on the negative. The media are obsessed with closures and lay offs. Ford engineers and designers had been phoning radio stations down here after the news broke, so I thought, lets get these guys in,” Petty told AdNews.
He wanted to show that Australian manufacturing is evolving, not dying. “The car is the old economy, the camera the new economy. There is a whole new world springing up. Australia is still making things.”
Petty said while he hadn't done a newspaper ad before, it was not difficult “because it was simply writing about a topic I know well.” So he went to the local library, knocked up the copy and got a couple of colleagues set it.
He booked a page in the paper and the phone started ringing. “We've got some awesome candidates coming in. It worked.”
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