Nissan Breaks New Campaign On MSN, Xbox

Nissan North America has launched a new ad campaign across a vast array of Microsoft properties, including MSN, Windows Live, Live Search, the Xbox game consoles and Windows Mobile.

The campaign follows on the heels of another major recent Nissan online initiative. Last month, the company forged a branding deal with Yahoo, to create the music channel "Nissan Sessions," which began airing live performances by A-list artists earlier this month.

"The portals are networks much like the TV networks in their own right," said Steve Kerho, Nissan's director of media and interactive marketing. "Our buyers are spending a lot of time there--so, to some extent, we just followed them there."

For the new campaign, Nissan is sponsoring the Forza Motorsport 2 console game on the Xbox 360, as well as a tournament in that game on Xbox Live. In addition, Nissan and MSN have created a co-branded blog, "Open for Design," which covers commercial and artistic design. Nissan is also purchasing paid search ads through Microsoft adCenter, and participating in pilot ad programs on Windows Mobile and Microsoft Office Live. The promotion also has a local component, embedding Nissan and Infiniti dealerships into Local Live Search mapping, with geo-targeted ads for individual dealerships.

Microsoft's new Digital Advertising Solutions unit negotiated and planned the deal--its first since the unit was launched created in September.

Eric Hadley, the group's general manager of global marketing, said that it was created to address multichannel deals like this one. "As today's consumers spend more and more time online across various digital devices like cell phones and video games, advertisers are finding they can no longer reach their entire target audience by advertising on a single medium," he said.

Agency OMD negotiated on Nissan's behalf for the media buys with both Microsoft and Yahoo. Tequila, its parent firm TBWA/Chiat/Day, and the Designory designed the ad creatives.

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