• by Karl Greenberg , September 30, 2015

Robert Brown, senior manager of interactive marketing at Nissan, and Steve Savic, ECD at one of Nissan's agencies, Calgary-based Omnicom shop Critical Mass, took the stage at Advertising Week in New York.

The pair took the opportunity to show off some recent campaigns where the product pitch becomes less about the pitch than the engagement, where social media is a driver for dealership leads, and when lead-generation just isn't the right KPI. 

Brown said at the outset that automakers are under constant pressure to create showroom traffic both with Tier 1 and Tier II; the challenge is keeping that pump going while taking care of the brand. “We interact with dealers very deeply, but it takes lots of coordination and communication, with the pressure around generating lower-funnel activity.”

But, he added, the key transaction is in the brand experience. Nissan had a big presence in this year's Super Bowl -- which, as Brown pointed out, was the biggest audience-grabber probably since the “M.A.S.H.” finale. Nissan's seat at that table was a campaign about fathers and sons, which Savic noted, was driven by the idea that the Super Bowl itself is a father/son experience. “It's rising to the cultural moment, something [fans] can relate to. We really want our audience to take an action; we need people to interact with the brand.” 

For the Leaf electric car, the company needed to find ways to explain what makes the car tick, and its virtues as an electric vehicle. They key was doing that without the usual advertising bullhorn, an approach that might have come off as something less than authentic, given the target audience. So, the automaker went to owners with a viral, social media platform. 

Savic says that worked well because of the “incredibly active consumer base” for the car. “We have a challenge because Leaf is not mainstream; and a lot of people don't really know how it works,” he says. “So, instead of talking about it ourselves, it's about having customers do the talking for us.” A digital interface lets owners share about their Leafs, and allows people to ask questions of them. “Our insight was to make the car accessible,” said Brown. 

Then there was the effort that was all about prototype F1 race car that ran the LeMans. Besides TV advertising, the effort spotlighting the LM P1 car includes a microsite, rich on interactive video content showing the car driven by one of the winners of Nissan’s GT Academy program. The intricately shot film lets users reverse, advance the car, and click on specific features, including the driver to zoom in and look under the vehicle’s skin and hood. 

Brown conceded that while it underperformed in lead generation for the brand (even though nobody is going to buy the car, it might have conceivably gotten people to showrooms anyway), it hit a lot of targets in other, perhaps more valuable, metrics around brand equity. “If you think about it in these terms, you can't say we missed our goal,” says Brown. “One thing is understanding the value of data beyond traditional web leads. We focused on overall opinion, which we measure from data from GfK. And that has a direct correlation with sales volume potential.” 

He said asking questions very specifically about brand opinion leads to salubrious results since that opinion goes way up. “Put this in perspective: If the general population had the same high opinion of the experience and site [as those who experienced it] we would take care of our volume objectives through FY 2019. The whole idea of not being beholden to web leads with a brand building experience, is really about using a set of very powerful tools. It's an arrow in our quiver.”