Adventures in Marketing: Lincoln Hires a New Ad Agency

Another day, another chance for this author to write about the Lincoln brand. This time, we learn of the company looking outside the WPP ad agency for help marketing its new Lincolns.

The Glass House is not ditching its longtime partner. Instead, it’s turning to the Wasserman Media Group and their Laundry Service ad shop based in New York to handle social media for a new campaign for the redesigned 2018 Lincoln Navigator SUV.

According to the industry website Ad Age, WPP established Hudson Rouge in 2012 to handle the Lincoln luxury brand. A Lincoln spokesperson confirmed with Ad Age that Hudson Rouge—known for Lincoln’s Matthew McConaughey ads— will continue to work with Lincoln, including on the Navigator campaign.

Laundry Service’s content-creation role on the campaign is significant, according to people familiar with the matter. Ford has worked with WPP since the mid-1940s, so any amount of advertising work shoveled elsewhere is worth noting.

As we know, hiring a new ad company is not the only change at Lincoln. After 10 years of trying to make the MKNothing naming scheme work, the brand is starting to move back into the realm of good sense by deploying real names for most of its new or restyled product.

Ford, as a whole, spent upwards of $2.3 billion on marketing in America last year, with receipts of over $4 billion for advertising expenditures around the globe. That puts the Blue Oval in the top 10 of the nation’s largest advertisers.

You’ll recall that recently-minted CEO Jim Hackett wants to trim spending, announcing plans to slash $14 billion in costs over the next five years. Kumar Galhotra, president of the Lincoln brand, was recently tapped as the company’s global chief marketing officer, though he also retained his role at Lincoln. Until this shuffle, global marketing was overseen by Stephen Odell, who announced his retirement after a 37-year career at Ford.

It doesn’t sound as if the Matthew McConaughey ads are going away, given that the new ad agency is – for now – only responsible for a small portion of the content for a single model in the Lincoln lineup. Love ‘em or hate ‘em – the McConaughey ads at least have people talking.

So long as Lincoln keeps getting parodied on YouTube, the company should continue with the McConaughey content. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.

[Image: Lincoln Motor Company/ YouTube]