Cuts in Mercury advertising cause speculation as to brand's future

Ford is removing all national TV ads and other traditional advertising venues from Mercury, thus feeding the speculation as to how long the brand will be around. Instead advertising funds will be directed towards online and dealership advertising.

Mercury sales are down 7 percent from last year, and there are no new models in the pipeline once the Milan is facelifted for the 2009 model year.

Mercury spokesman Mark Schirmer states: “a directional thing that we’ve been working on for awhile, reshaping how we use the same pot” of marketing money. He said Ford believes that it will “get more traction” for Mercury sales by reallocating more advertising money to online efforts and to dealers.

“It’s just not a big enough pot of money to do traditional TV for Mercury and make it effective,” Schirmer said. “It’s not a significant enough chunk to break through. We have to be smarter with those resources.”

© Source: autoobserver
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