Ford Reaches New Heights with the 50th Anniversary of the Mustang
For the 50th anniversary of the Ford Mustang, the Dearborn manufacturer wants to do something big. They want to aim for the sky. Turns out, someone from the Mad Men era already did something pretty crazy 50 years ago. Why not repeat the same feat?
If you want to generate media buzz about a new model today, you just have to sit in front of a computer and get busy on the various social media sites. Half a century earlier, that was not so simple.
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Back in 1966, the CEO of the Empire State Building, Robert Leury, looked at the sales number of the the Mustang and decided he wanted to get a piece of all that action. He contacted William Benton, advertising director of Ford, and convinced him to unveil the 1966 Mustang Convertible on his building. No, not inside the Empire State Building. ON it, on the rooftop.
The problem was, with the shape of the dome on top of the building, you couldn’t just use a helicopter to drop a car there. And since it was the highest building in the world at the time, there were no cranes tall enough to reach the observatory… So in typical 1960’s fashion, they decided to use the most flamboyant method they could think of: take a brand-new 1966 Mustang convertible, remove everything inside, chop it into smaller parts, and fit everything into transport dollies so it could ride the elevators.
In October 1965, a team of engineers parked a transport truck in front of the Empire State Building, and began unloading their convertible. In front of a very surprised crowd, they sawed the car into 3 distinct parts, and began the transport of those parts into the building to the elevators.
The Mustang was successfully reassembled before 4:30 the next morning, on the 86th floor of the building. Journalists flocked to the car, and 14,000 visitors saw the white Ford on the first day alone. This generated a lot of publicity for the Mustang, and in 1966 they sold 607,568 of them, the best-selling year ever.
This year, on April 16-17, the feat will be done once again with a 2015 Ford Mustang convertible. Since the new model is 18 cm longer and 10 cm larger than the one they used in 1966, this marketing stunt promises to be interesting…