Dawes Fiestas With Ford on the Road to Bonnaroo
June 10, 2010 by Matthew Finio
Musicians have a love/hate relationship with touring. Unless you’ve got the mass appeal to afford private jets or swanky buses, the romantic images of open roads, time-honored venues and adoring fans soon give way to the realities of epic drives, unloading the van and the lethal combination of close quarters and fast food. For LA-based folk rock band Dawes, however, the concept took a turn for the better when Ford handed them a video camera and the keys to a spanking new Fiesta.
Dawes (brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith, Wylie Gelber and Alex Casnoff) have been documenting their journey across country as they play their way to Bonnaroo, the annual music and arts festival in Manchester, Tennessee that begins today. Bonnaroo features rock performers like Dawes along with artists of complementary styles such as jazz, Americana, hip-hop and electronica.
Pomegranate CEO (and former Dawes member) Grant Powell helped secure the wheels through contacts related to Pomegranate's partnership with YouTube marketing programs. He suggested Dawes as the perfect candidate to show off Ford’s fun subcompact and create the kind of videos they were looking for.
“Target audiences are much more fragmented these days,” says Powell. “This kind of grassroots marketing lets Ford comfortably place their product in a real situation that Dawes fans, who are potential Fiesta buyers, will pay attention to.”
Ford is no stranger to music. It pays a pretty penny each season to be a large presence (along with Coke and AT&T) on Fox’s “American Idol,” creating music video-inspired commercials that feature the show’s top finalists cavorting with their cars.
Musically, Dawes and Bonnaroo are a little more edgy. “The videos help Ford reach an audience that probably doesn’t watch 'American Idol,'” Powell adds.
Dawes’s Fiesta is a “world car,” a model Ford manufactures with little variation throughout the globe including in Europe, South America, South Africa, Mexico, and Japan. The 2010 Fiesta marks the first time the model has been sold in America and Canada since the 1978-80 version.
You can watch Dawes and their Fiesta in action by checking out this California stop at the beautiful Henry Miller Library in Big Sur or this later appearance in Brooklyn, NY.
