Ford today issued a press release saying that it had reached its goal of sending out 15,000,000 press releases.
“This is a remarkable achievement for the Ford Motor Company,” said Ford spokeschief Sid Deet. “At the end of 2009, when we set this monumental goal, we were sending out the industry standard of one, maybe two press releases every month. Now, we can claim to send out more press releases than any other automaker, domestic, foreign or Japanese. If that’s not ‘Going Further,’ I don’t know what the hell is.”
Ford’s massive press release project started out as a plan to reduce the negative publicity surrounding the then-new Taurus and Taurus SHO.
“We figured if we could flood the journalists’ e-mail boxes with useless press releases, their computers would bog down and they wouldn’t be able to write that the new Taurus was ugly and had less back seat room than the old one,” said Ford’s Vice President of the Internets, Skip Monty-Hall. “But then we thought, if ol’ Henry Ford could turn out fifteen million Model Ts, we could put out 15 million press releases. What a great tribute to a great man.”
Sources tell Autoblopnik that Ford also considered publishing a newspaper that blamed the Jews for our current economic crisis as a tribute to Henry Ford, but the idea was vetoed by the company’s accounting department, citing “our dependence on privately held banking interests.”
“We’ve seen research saying that if you send more than one press release a week, the media just ignore you,” said Monty-Hall, “but that’s just bullshit. Come on, dude, these are automotive journalists. They drive cars and eat steak for a living. It’s not like they have real jobs.”
Ford’s heavy promotion schedule has put a strain on the automotive media, which has had to hire extra workers just to deal with the flood of press releases.
“We get a couple hundred Ford press releases a day,” said Jacob Bourne, recently hired at Automotion.com. “Most of them are useless, like this one, which is about how Mark Fields saw a cloud that he thought looked like an elephant, but then he decided it looked more like a castle. But every once in a while they slip in something newsworthy, like telling us that they do actually intend to build the Ford Focus RS someday instead of just sending out press releases about it. So we have no choice but to read all of them.”
© Autoblopnik