With Ford’s ‘By Design’ campaign, your art might star in the brand’s next billboard

By Andrew Hard December 9, 2015

fords by design campaign lets customers billboards ford focus st — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Have you ever driven by a huge advertising billboard and thought you could do better? Thanks to Ford’s new “By Design” campaign, you can.

The American automaker is lettings its customers (or anybody else) crank out artwork for digital billboards all across the country. Simply head to the brand’s dedicated website and choose a city — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or Miami — and pick your preferred Ford vehicle. Once you’ve done that, your artistic side is encouraged to take over as you are invited to add a variety of fractals, smoke trails, and chalk smudges around the car.

“We wanted consumers to experience and be a part of our brand in a unique way,” said Lisa Schoder, Ford’s digital marketing manager. “By showcasing what our consumers’ vehicles mean to them, we have made their individual expressions the driving message of our campaign.”

After submitting your composition, it goes up for viewing somewhere in your selected city — Times Square or the San Francisco Bay Bridge, for example — with your name and hometown attached. For added vanity, the company will send you a webcam shot of the artwork on display, something Ford calls a “billboard selfie.” Check the process out in the video below, but keep those tunes going because the video has no sound.

When it’s not devising new ways for people to interact with its products, Ford is busy bringing old, broken engines back to life. Last week, the company detailed a technology called Plasma Transferred Wire Arc, which lines the walls of cylinder blocks with a high-tech coating to bring them back to factory condition. According to the manufacturer, the technique utilizes far fewer resources than are required to build a new engine, while also generating 50-percent fewer CO2 emissions.

In other Ford news, the company has added Siri Eyes Free voice control to over five million vehicles this month viaa software update. You can read more about the story here.

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