Autos April 27, 2010, 5:04PM EST

Ford Finds Its Cool Selling the Hot Fiesta

To promote the hip, new Fiesta subcompact to younger buyers, Ford went viral. So far the campaign has been a hit

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(Editors note: Updated to change mph to mpg in the 18th paragraph.)

I have a friend—we'll call him Ted—who is perfect for the new Mexican-made Ford Fiesta, which will make its debut this summer.

Ted's wife (we'll call her Betty) would also dig the Fiesta. Both are big-time geeks—think of a home crammed with flatscreen TVs and Apple everything; if it's a gadget, they own it or want it. Ted and Betty own a Scion and a Subaru and are solidly middle-class, late-twentysomethings. Oddly, the reason they and the Fiesta make so much sense together is barely about the car.

It's a great car, really. (More on that below.) But Ted and Betty are mistrustful of U.S. cars. Their parents were, too. They are not universally skeptical, however. They are avid, voracious consumers of both tangible products and of culture. They love social media. They love TV—mostly reality TV, which they watch on their own schedule—on Hulu or downloaded from iTunes.

In other words, they are much like the rest of the U.S.—mistrustful of all that is mainstream and formulaic—and also like a certain subset of car buyer whose parents soured on domestic vehicles and who, as kids, never sat in a Buick and whose only previous real exposure to a Ford (F) car was in the backseat of a Crown Vic taxicab.

Enter a new Ford model, the company's first in over a decade that needs to attract just such a young, hip, media-shy, marketing-averse consumer. To reach that consumer, Ford decided against using a mainstream advertising campaign. It didn't just want to blanket social media sites such as Facebook because who wants to "friend" a car? No, Ford needed a different approach. It reached out to prime movers—also known as influencers—on Facebook and Twitter—to laud the Ford Fiesta's virtues, which led to creation of the Fiesta Movement a year ago.

bold, word-of-mouth prerelease

The Fiesta Movement is a viral marketing campaign in which Ford gave away 100 Fiestas (the subcompact, so-called B-segment car already existed in Europe) to "social agents" who would be willing to make and post movies on YouTube, take photos, blog, tweet and otherwise spread the gospel of Fiesta-ness as wide as possible.

What's interesting here is not that Ford co-opted people to drive its cars and spread its message, but that Ford was willing to take the risk. This, it turns out, was a stroke of brilliance. Think for a moment of how tightly controlled messaging is from most brands. Even über-hip Apple (AAPL) wouldn't dare prerelease the iPad to 100 contestants to let them test-drive the product—for an entire year before its debut date—and blab to the world about it. Imagine what they might say?

For the Facebook and Twitter generation, one in which the line between self-marketing/branding and privacy hardly exists—especially for the most extroverted millennials—word-of-mouth is often considered far more trustworthy than the old-line, top-down approach. Ted and Betty don't trust a restaurant review, but they trust Chowhound.

Same goes for the Fiesta, kind of. If the people in these homemade videos think it's cool, and they mirror Ted and Betty's sense of self—Ford thinks the $13,995 car will appeal to twentysomethings, urbanites, and empty-nesters, so the with-it/fashion factor is expected to weigh heavily on buying decisions—then maybe it actually is a cool car. Maybe Ted and Betty ought to pay attention.