Morale booster: Ad shows the kind of SA we can become; Kudos to Netflix for important content and clever promotion.
The best of advertising and marketing often fulfils a dual role, intended or not, and can become an important piece of cultural history.
That is why the latest brand ad by Ford South Africa is so interesting – because it goes well beyond promoting the Blue Oval itself.
It is a modern fable, or story with a message – and this one is about how, if you look after a golden goose, then it will lay plenty of tasty golden eggs for you.
And that is a much broader lesson for those who would rid our country of the evils of capitalism and decry the importance of direct foreign investment.
Ford’s global parent company has ploughed more than R15bn into its manufacturing facility at Silverton outside Pretoria and more than R600m into an engine plant at Struandale in the Eastern Cape.
They did this because the government came to the party and helped set up a Special Economic Zone north of the capital specifically to cater for motor manufacturers and component suppliers.
Still, it was a serious decision by the company’s US headquarters to put down the money and the South African Ford team – led by the then Ford SA managing director Neale Hill (he is now head of the whole Ford operation for Africa) – had to sell their pitch.
That they got the nod from their bosses was despite the fact that, by many metrics, South Africa is not a great place to locate a car building plant. We are what is known in the economics business as an “end of hemisphere” supplier a long distance from many markets.
Yet Ford – as well as other carmakers like Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Isuzu and Mercedes Benz – believe we are more than viable as a production centre. Government incentives make the investments worthwhile.
What Ford’s new promotional spot shows is how such investments create jobs, not just for the people employed directly…