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JWT heats up some Ford sauce, catches the eye of HQ with ‘The Passengers’

How do you showcase the power of a car without reverting to shots of driving on winding mountain roads? If you’re Ford and JWT, you create a very hot, limited edition chilli sauce. 

The Fiesta ST, a “fire-breathing, ground-scorching sports hatch that packs a whole lot of power into a small package”, is only available in limited numbers. So, JWT aimed to replicate the sensory hit of going for a hoon by getting Chris Cullen of Culleys to whip up a bespoke hot sauce (StopPress recommendation: try the chimichurri). 

It tracked down the hottest chillies grown in New Zealand, so the sauce clocks in at 1.463 million scovilles (as a point of comparison, Blair’s 3am sauce, an American-made hot sauce that was used on Hell’s Pizza Roulette pizzas, boasts a Scoville rating of two million). And then in placed the bottles in trendy Mexican restaurants, burger joints where car clubs meet up on cruise nights and food carts at motorsport tracks. 

JWT’s creative director Cleve Cameron says 3,000 bottles were made and 1,500 of them were distributed around Auckland, with other potential customers sent a bottle via a direct mail campaign. And it’s worked well, he says, because two thirds of the cars have been sold in the space of six weeks. 

It also put the chill sauce inside bespoke Adshels and gave away a few bottles on the Ford Facebook page. 

As for The Passengers, which was the backbone of Ford’s X Factor NZ sponsorship and filmed contestants indulging in a bit of Kuga karaoke, he says Ford has a global award called ‘Go Further’ that rewards creative work from around the world for delivering on the company’s brand promise. 

“It’s great for us,” says Cameron. “We’re a small agency and we only get to do a few major things a year for Ford. So it’s nice to be on the global radar.”

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