Ford rolled out the razzmatazz at the Paris Motor Show this week, when pop diva Kylie Minogue personally unveiled the two-seater convertible Streetka to a pulsating beat.
Ford rolled out the razzmatazz at the Paris Motor Show this week, when pop diva Kylie Minogue personally unveiled the two-seater convertible Streetka to a pulsating beat.
The world’s second-largest manufacturer splashed out on massive press party on Wednesday night and saw to it that Minogue – a big drawcard in Europe and her native Australia – was on hand to unveil the company’s new Streetka.
Ford, which went from a profit of R76,7 billion in 1999 and R36,8 billion in 2000, posted a R57,8 billion loss last year.
Minogue’s appearance on behalf of Ford has been one of the highlights of the Paris Motor Show to date. She was the biggest personality from “down under” to grace a Ford event since Lebanese-born Australian Jacques Nasser was ousted as the company’s chief executive in October last year.
The artist, on the final leg of a European tour, slowly pulled back a sheet covering the body of a two-seater convertible Streetka to the beat of a raucous pop track. “She’s very big over here,” Ford Europe’s chairman and chief executive David Thursfield told one US reporter, who wasn’t quite sure who Minogue was.
Thursfield and the rest of the audience then watched as Minogue, whose latest hit “Fever” has sold about five million copies worldwide, scrawled her signature across the hood of a Streetka destined, perhaps, to become a collector’s edition.
“It’s kind of small and elegant,” Ford spokesman Paul Harrison said of the Streetka. “And she (Minogue) is very much that kind of person.”
The company pulled all the stops at a party in a made-over warehouse for hundreds of journalists and other guests, many of them greeted by the cigar-chomping Thursfield and Ford chairman and chief executive Bill Ford Jr.
Ford declined to comment on the cost of the affair or on how much it spent sponsoring Minogue’s European tour.
“We’re just trying to demonstrate that there is still a lot of pride left in the brand,” said Ford Europe spokesman Neil Golightly.