Aspirations to Mediocrity

I rather like the current Ford Focus FT advert. It makes me smile. People, well sterotyped midde-aged men off to work in the guise of their boyhood dreams, leaving home as astronauts, JCB drivers or super-heroes. "What did you want to do when you grew up?" it asks. Which is very topical for me, having just had an embarrassingly big birthday. I have been remembering my childhood aspirations and wondering if I have time left to realise them.

But somehow, the question and the sponsor don't fit. I doubt that very many men dreamed of a Ford as the pinnacle of their ambitions. As a young boy we didn't have the money for a car, but I still didn't aspire to a Ford. A Bentley perhaps, or a Ferrari, a Jaguar, or even a Rover, but not a Ford. As I grew up we did have cars - a couple of second or third-hand Ford Z-cars: a Zephyr and a Zodiak. Big cars with bench seats that could hold all six of us and a few small friends. Very functional for a large family, but driving one of those was not what I dreamed of doing when I grew up. That would have just been aspiring to mediocrity, to a state that my father himself wanted to rise above. I am sure that many of us aspired to things that we haven't achieved, but to replace these dreams with a an bright orange Ford ST is to insult them.

For me, this advert fails in a way that I think much good creative British advertising fails. There are good, sometimes even great creative ideas, maybe even linked to truly original consumer insights, but not equally linked to an inner truth about the product. I loved the Guinness "swimmer" ad, but it didn't make me want to drink Guinness. Some of Honda's "Power of Dreams" adverts are inspired, but they don't make me think that a Honda Civic is more inspired than a Renault Clio.

Jeremy Clarkson commented that the Ford ST is the only car sharing its name with a feminine hygene product ( and maybe they will come out with an infectious Diesel version, the Ford STD), but if it is just targeted, as the adverts seem to be, at middle aged men that probably doesn't matter, as most won't notice. But the disconnect between the promise and the product is one for which they shouldn't be forgiven - by shareholders, if not by lost potential customers.