The Car You Had to Dance For

In the spring of 2014, Ford ran a competition in Germany where eight teams of amateur content creators—from Salzwedel, Bochum, Munich, the Ruhr valley—spent several weeks competing across escalating challenges to win a car. Not a gift card. Not a press trip. An actual automobile. All they had to do was herd sheep on camera, make themselves go viral on Facebook, and perform a samba in the street convincingly enough that strangers on the internet would vote for them.

It sounds absurd because it was, a little. But there was something honest underneath it too. This was the exact moment brands realized they could outsource creativity and spectacle to enthusiastic strangers who wanted something badly enough to humiliate themselves online for it. No actors, no polished scripts—just eight teams of genuinely car-obsessed people doing increasingly strange things for an audience of followers and the faint promise of a Ford EcoSport waiting at the finish line. The production values were whatever the participants could manage. The stakes were real.

The whole format has since calcified into something much slicker and more cynical—influencer contracts, performance clauses, brand deals with NDAs attached. In 2014 it still felt vaguely like a game show that had escaped into the internet, which made it weirder and more watchable than almost anything actually on TV that spring.