Lincoln to go a-Twitter with Super Bowl ad

Lincoln will spend $7.6 million to air a Super Bowl commercial, and use those 60 precious seconds to broadcast five dramatized tweets from real people.

In the luxury car brand’s first-ever Super Bowl spot, the five crowd-sourced tweets — garnered by social media-savvy comedian Jimmy Fallon — will showcase ultra-wacky road-trip experiences. For the Lincoln division of Ford Motor, it’s a high-stakes effort to redo its image and appeal to a new generation of buyers. The five tweets were selected from among some 6,117 solicited by Fallon, who asked folks to send him tweets about their craziest road trips. Fallon is under contract to the automaker, but does not appear in the ad.

“We have to pull out all the stops to get noticed and get Lincoln back on folks’ radar,” says Matt VanDyke, director of global Lincoln marketing. The hope, he says, is to lower the brand’s average buyer age from the current 65 to 55 years.

For Lincoln, which is desperately trying to reinvent itself and appeal to younger drivers with new products, it’s all about using a Super Bowl social media platform to do it.

The ad will highlight the redesigned 2013 Lincoln MKZ midsize sedan, and be filmed later this week on the West Coast.

The theme, says Jon Pearce, chief creative officer at ad agency Hudson Rouge, is, “an unexpected story from an unexpected automobile.”