CHALLENGE

In December 1999, Nissan USA wanted to generate some excitement and brand awareness around their new Sentra (a sporty sedan), due to be released in February 2000. As is usual in these affairs, they were unable to unveil the new car, or provide any real details of its features, or even what it would look like. So how did Nissan inspire potential customers enough to provide contact details and request further information about it?

CREATIVE:
Nissan (and their agency, Magnet Interactive) decided not to opt for a standard banner ad, which, as you know, attempts to lure users away from the Web site it is placed on. Instead, they decided to exploit the immediacy of the Web, and came up with a visually appealing ad which could actually collect viewers’ home and email addresses without diverting them to another site (although the option to click through was there for those who wanted it). The ad, running with SUPERSTITIAL technology (provided by US-based rich media company Unicast), played like a TV commercial - teaser messages and attractive, close-up images of parts of the car flashed along to an upbeat soundtrack. At the end of the ad, a pull-down menu appeared, giving viewers the option to enter email and/or snail mail addresses.

MEDIA BUYS
Nissan ran the ad on sites such as Hollywood.com, and Mplayer.com – sites where the ad wouldn’t come across as too intrusive, and where Nissan could be sure that they’d reach their target market of 18 to 30-year-olds. The ad ran at these sites through December 1999 and January 2000.



RESULTS

Nissan was able to glean over 6,000 sales leads from the ad alone in the first six weeks of the campaign. And even though generating clickthroughs was not a major aim of the campaign, Nissan reported a 9% clickthrough rate for the ad in the first couple of weeks. This levelled out to 4.5% over the campaign as a whole.

COST: We don’t have actual figures, but you can safely assume that this cost a fraction of what it would have cost Nissan to generate the same sort of response from a TV or print ad campaign.