• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, November 10, 2015

When you say “college sports” everyone in the room will probably imagine their team, favorite sport, or mascot. Houses nationwide are painted in their owners’ team colors. Many have rooms that are de facto shrines to the household alma mater. Nissan is hoping to tap into that passion with its historic deal that infuses its brand, nationally and locally, into the NCAA sports experience at some 100 colleges. Jeremy Tucker, Nissan's U.S. CMO, says the company's huge new program is about connecting that national brand down to the local market, and tying both to a major passion point for students, alumnae and fans. He speaks to Marketing Daily about the game plan. 

Q: Broadly speaking, who were the teams involved in putting this juggernaut together?

A: My marketing and sales teams, (media agency) OMD, (regional agency) Zimmerman, (creative agency of record) TBWA\Chiat\Day, and (digital agency) Critical Mass, all worked together as one team. We created a custom playbook, market by market for all 65 markets these 100 schools represent. We have a market by market strategy with assets we developed at the national level customized to the local level. It's a tremendous undertaking, with a robust toolkit for the regions and dealers, including dealers outside the [participating college] DMAs.

Q: Is this mainly about football, or is it an effort to go beyond?  

A: We have had a great stake in football and the NBA from a media perspective, and our local media runs across several sports. But this deal is all 22 college sports — football, baseball, basketball, tennis, hockey, golf, you name it — for both men and women. 

Q: What is the benefit of that? 

A: This program gives us a tremendous presence 11 months out of the year on these campuses. Activating at the sporting events gives us a dominant position in stadiums, and signage position in arenas, auditoriums, fields, diamonds, working through all the rights, and using logos we have created with this deal. It's massive in  scale.

Q: This is like tiling a floor the old-fashioned way. Don't you lose the efficiencies and scale you'd get with a national NCAA deal where you lay down the whole sheet at once? And you are dealing with six rights groups, by itself a big job.

A: To a degree, yes. But of our six rights holders, IMG College and Learfield Sports control a majority, the others round it out. [Nissan has a relationship with those two with its Heisman Trophy sponsorship]. And, yes, there is a challenge in terms of efficiencies and scale, kind of the first barrier for us. But the real challenge in this market is being true to the fan experience, which differs campus by campus. The LSU Tiger fan [culture] versus Alabama, for example — trying to bring that local flavor. The key was how to create the look and feel in a way that involves a customizable template, one that allows the flexibility for local dealers and regions to actually put their spin on it — to make sure school colors and slogans and marks are used in the right way, a way that is on brand and represents the passion of the team. It's a lot of work to crack the code on that. 

Q: How about media buys around this? How are you bringing that to bear locally?

A: The great news is that with our Zimmerman Advertising team, we already do a lot of programmatic buys, especially at the Tier II level. And this is really taking advantage of, and keeping in place all the media we currently buy. But it adds some additional weight from the headquarters level to pump up our share of voice. The key for me is to make it as easy and flexible as possible for our dealers. It is not just negotiated at the national level with local grass roots thrown in. Dealers can leverage the assets at the local dealer level — the marks, the colors, the slogans, ticket banks for games, access to coaches and players. You can pay a lot of money to do some logo slapping, but we wanted to create a trifecta: engaging the dealers, the 180 million fans over 11 months of the year, and the brand. 

Q: This must have taken a long time. What's the time-line for this? 

A: We put this together in record time. It came across my desk in late May, the teams presented it to me in June, we brought it to (Carlos Ghosn, chairman, president and CEO of Nissan Motor) in July. We started developing the playbook in September. The agencies, my marketing team, developed a strategy and custom media plan including radio, TV, digital, social. I challenge my team all the time to be uncommon. Good ideas come from anywhere, from the most junior manager to senior executive, and, literally, this was a “what if” conversation, something where you see a good idea, do the analysis and put it through rigor points, and make it happen.