A Lucire special promotion

Land Rover and Young & Rubicam recently teamed up for a special promotion in New Zealand, where a 1957 Series I Land Rover was secretly bought, restored to its former glory and given back to its seller for Valentine’s Day.
   Will Radford, the New Zealand marketing manager at Jockey, put up an ad on Trade Me (a site not unlike Ebay) to sell the Land Rover that he and three friends bought while students at Otago University. Land Rover paid NZ$1,330 and a bottle of Scotch, and, over a five-month restoration process, brought it back to its former glory.
   It’s not in concours shape. The restorers at Custom Metal Shapers in Auckland left some of the dents in the aluminium body work, and painstakingly re-created the bumper stickers.
   New Zealand Marketing magazine’s Ben Fahy, Radford’s brother-in-law, wrote in Stop Press that he knew of the secret arrangement a week before Radford did, as family members were lured to Radford’s home, along with the three former classmates, to watch the 45-second spot that told the above story.
   The prime-time spot ended with ‘Claire has the keys’.
   Fahy notes that the campaign had the backing of Jaguar Land Rover’s head office.
   It’s particularly fitting as the company is phasing out the Defender shortly, the classic Land Rover that descended from Radford’s Series I.
   Reminding people of Land Rover’s heritage should stand the company in good stead when it shows the Defender’s replacement in the next year or so.
   The fate of the original Defender is unknown, though there are rumours it could survive, built in a factory outside the UK. Related models such as the Iveco Massif and the Marattab Pazhan and Herour continue to be built in Spain and Iran.


Post sponsored by Land Rover