You might think Ford would have accepted that its Bond days were over when it sold the Aston Martin marque back into British hands in 2007. But that would be to underestimate quite what a determined product-placer Ford actually is.
Even before Daniel Craig picked up his Ford Mondeo hire-car in 2006's Casino Royale - presumably Avis had just rented out the last Aston Martin DBS - the US auto giant had dropped 23 Fords, Mercurys and Lincolns into nine Bond movies.
Of those cars, Bond found himself behind the wheel of five, while Bond girls accounted for another four.
Historically, the really big fans of Ford have been the Bond baddies, ten of whom have opted for the smooth ride and excellent credit terms offered by the Ford Motor Company over the years. However, the real Ford drivers are the henchmen - Goldfinger's Oddjob alone had three in the 1964 film.
Perhaps because the henchman market is a niche one in automotive terms, forthcoming Bond flick Quantum of Solace will see Ford pursue an entirely new strategy. The target of this Bond film, from Ford's perspective, is women, and it is going for them both on screen and online.
The new Ford Ka got its public premiere on 31 October, when Quantum opened in Britain, France and Sweden. In the driving seat is a new-style Bond girl, the revenge-focused, nut-crushing and - whisper it - non-Bond-shagging Camille, played by Ukrainian model and actress Olga Kurylenko.
A programme of online activity launched in the summer, built around social networks and major portals, and employing user-generated content and plenty of official video footage alongside conventional TV exposure. And what makes this campaign significant, if not specifically unique, is the fact that it is prepared to go out and find its market without insisting on clumsily reeling them in.
"The big change for Ford here is that instead of developing a Ford/Bond microsite to drive people to, we have taken our content and served it up in places where people go anyway," says Joanne Sheehan, Ford's European head of communications planning. "People go to places such as MySpace and Yahoo! They opt in when they go to those spaces and become part of the community we are talking to."
It is this activity that is responsible for seeding Ford's character-driven tie-in. The coming months will show whether you really can market to women via an action-movie franchise, albeit one that has, in recent instalments, embraced the concept of sexual equality.
"This time around, it is all about the Bond girl," says Sheehan. "This is the first one who does not really have a substantial love affair-type relationship with Bond. Everything is on her terms and she is out to get revenge in the same way he is out to get the bad guy."
The hope is that this emancipated female will appeal more to modern women than the type of old-school Bond girl who exists only to get her dress undone with a magnetic watch or cuddle up with Bond in a lifeboat over the closing credits.
"Olga is very much Bond's equal and she drives a small, sassy, cheeky-looking car," says Sheehan. "When people see the film, it will make a lot of sense in terms of why we have taken the direction we have."
The central piece of product placement, as with the Mondeo in Casino Royale, is the work of Ford of Europe, which has latterly managed to elbow BMW out of the picture and reclaim Ford's accustomed spot after a three-film interlude during the Brosnan years.
As before, the relationship between Ford and the film's makers, MGM/Sony Pictures, is one of mutual marketing support: Quantum of Solace showcases the Ka, while Ford pushes Quantum of Solace across its marketing programme.
Given that the Ka appeals to "young women or women of a youthful attitude", according to Sheehan, the digital activity finds Ford targeting the online places those women are most likely to be found. Where some brands might have attempted to drive traffic to a central website or a microsite, Ford is taking a more realistic approach.
"The audience we are going after - younger women, 22 to 30, fashionable - are not really the type of people who are going to go to the Ford website. It's just not really going to happen," says Norm Johnston, global digital head at MindShare, the media agency behind the campaign for Ford.
"This was really about how do we take the unique content we have and socialise it? How do we come up with something that enables us to create a dialogue without hitting them over the head with a Ford Ka?"
The solution, as Ford and MindShare saw it, was to find the appropriate distribution model for the abundant content they were able to draw from the film and from additional media partners, which include MTV, Conde Nast's Glamour magazine and Comcast's E! channel.
That content includes a Bond special for MTV's Made strand, in which an "ugly duckling" is chosen to be transformed into a Bond girl. In two-and-a-half weeks, the competition received 1,700 applicants, all of whom uploaded their own video clip.
Meanwhile, E! trailed Olga Kurylenko in diary style, even as she went for the part. The actress subsequently blogged on MySpace, where she accepted friend requests. Bit by bit, the content accumulated, augmented with movie snippets, Daniel Craig interviews and other tiny parcels of entertainment, to be planted on portals and elsewhere across the web.
"With this notion of people being able to access video content, it doesn't necessarily need to live on TV any more - it can reside online," says Johnston. "It is a great way to reach them without the cost of putting it on TV."
Vibrant media clips and behaviourally targeted ads through the Blue Lithium network kept up the pressure on the target market.
The campaign also includes a significant paid search component, driving traffic largely to Quantum of Solace pages on MTV and MySpace, while the various Bond phrases have been optimised for natural search as well.
Even away from the portals and the networking sites, the emphasis throughout the campaign is on sociability. A downloadable 'which Bond Girl are you?' widget is a case in point. "Pretty much all this content we made, there was always this call to action, to share it with somebody," says Johnston.
At the heart of all this content creation, of course, is the Olga-Ka relationship sketched out in the film itself. While Ford didn't get to write the script, Sheehan admits to having a pretty good idea that their moment wouldn't be left on the cutting-room floor.
"The moment you first see the Ka is when Bond first meets Camille," she says. "So we knew then we were on a good road to making the final cut of the film. Whatever else happens, Bond has to meet Camille."
This moment arose from a careful comparison of priorities between brand and studio. "The great thing about having a long-standing partnership like this is that you get in very early," says Sheehan.
"You let them know what you've got coming, what kind of angles you're looking for. They look at the script and, if there is a natural fit, they can include it in a meaningful, integrated way. The last thing you want is something that looks really gratuitous."
The advertiser's vision of "independent, free-spirited women who are out there doing things themselves", in Sheehan's words, chimed with a direction the Bond series has been taking for several films now.
Every Bond film claims, of course, to have redesigned the template, and marketers are not averse to doing the same thing. But what has resulted in this case is a campaign from a genuinely unusual angle, and Sheehan believes it reflects well on Ford and even on that wily old misogynist James Bond.
"We are hoping that this niche targeting route will give us some stand-out, because we are the ones who focused on women," says Sheehan. "And that's not just to be different, but because there is a great business case for Ford and a great business case there for the studio too."
SMART THINK!NG BOND BRANDING HISTORY
- American Motors paid to fill The Man with the Golden Gun with its cars, although they weren't available in Thailand, where it was set
- Six companies, including Ford, Sony and Omega, competed for attention in Casino Royale - 50 per cent less than Die Another Day
- The most-reported damp squib in Bond terms is Omega - the focus of a conversation between Bond and Vesper Lind in Casino Royale
- Ford, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Virgin Atlantic, Smirnoff, Sony and Omega are all in Quantum of Solace
- Quantum of Solace features an Aston Martin DBS V12, Daimler DS420 and an Alfa Romeo 159 for the villain
- Philip Morris allegedly paid $350,000 to have Timothy Dalton wield a pack of Lark cigarettes in Licence To Kill
- Some Bond films pack in ritzy brands. Golden Eye gave us Perrier, Bollinger and British Airways, and View To A Kill gave us BP, Bacardi and Chevron.
SMART THINK!NG FILM TIE-UPS
1. Be subtle. A worthwhile interaction in the neutral spaces of the web is worth more than a forced trip to a brand website
2. Be non-traditional. The right content gets under marketing-resistant consumers like no brand-focused banner ad can
3. Work hard. Create fresh content of your own and find reasons for your target audience to do the same
4. View the web as just another screen. Online video can do some of the work of TV if you're prepared to seed it widely enough
5. Be realistic. The entertainment is more important to the viewer than the brand, but that doesn't mean the brand can't benefit.