Lincoln seeks Abe’s help

Ford Motor Co., seeking to revive sales of Lincoln vehicles, is fielding the brand’s first Super Bowl spot as well as a television commercial that portrays the U.S. president who gave the luxury line its name.

The 60-second TV ad, which debuted last week, opens with an actor playing Abraham Lincoln emerging from mist. It also shows vintage models and images of Dean Martin and Clark Gable, who owned Lincoln cars, alongside the new MKZ sedan.

The nod to the luxury line’s 90-year heritage is part of Ford’s $1 billion bet that it can stem a 63 per cent slide in Lincoln sales since their peak in 1990.

Ford also introduced the “Lincoln Motor Company,” a marketing term meant to create distance between the brand’s vehicles and mainstream Fords built in the same factories.

“It’s our largest campaign ever from the size, scale and reach of it,” Matt VanDyke, Lincoln’s direc- tor of marketing, sales and service, said recently. “Every touch point is being reinvented. Everything we’re doing is different.”

Rebuilding Lincoln is a “daunting task,” according to Mark Fields, who took over as Ford’s chief operating officer Dec. 1 after heading its Americas region for seven years. The brand has fallen behind Bayerische Motoren Werke AG’s BMW, Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz, Toyota Motor Corp.’ s Lexus and Volkswagen AG’s Audi in the U.S. and globally.

Ford hopes to jump-start Lincoln’s revival with the 60-second ad that will debut on the Super Bowl.

Lincoln will solicit consumer script suggestions for the spot on Twitter, VanDyke said. Ford has hired comedian and talk-show host Jimmy Fallon to help produce the spot from the Twitter responses.

“We’re going to put a different twist on it and approach it in a very social way and try to do something that hasn’t been done before,” VanDyke said.