2019 Winners & Shortlists

PREDICTIVE RADIO SPOTS

Short List
BrandAWR ARABIAN AUTOMOBILE
Product/ServiceNISSAN X-TRAIL WITH INTELLIGENT FORWARD COLLISION WARNING.
EntrantTBWA\RAAD Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
CategoryDurable Consumer Goods, including Cars
Idea Creation TBWA\RAAD Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Media Placement OMD Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Production SONIDO ANTRO Miami, USA

Why is this work relevant for Direct?

How does a brand bring their complicated and complex intelligent driving technology to life through a radio spot? It's not an easy task, but that's exactly what Nissan did through some smart thinking and innovative executions. To do this, Nissan drew parallels between their intelligent forward collision warning feature, the ability for the vehicle to predict what’s in front of you and intervene when needed, and the ability of the radio spot to predict the next upcoming advertisement.

Background.

Nissan is the leader in automotive technology. Through their Intelligent Mobility technology, they’ve successfully become the leaders in electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and vehicles with connected technology. However, most people are unaware of Nissan's leadership position in intelligent vehicle technology, and to make matters worse, getting people to understand these complicated and confusing innovations is a difficult communications task. Nissan needed to make people aware of and understand their intelligent mobility technology in a way that was clear, concise, and intriguing to increase test drives of the Nissan X-Trail.

Describe the creative idea.

Our idea: bring some intelligent innovation to an advertising medium considered to be old, boring, and traditional. The new Nissan X-Trail is packed with innovative technology. We needed to find a way to bring this technology to life on one of the oldest advertising channels, radio. Traditionally, radio spots are boring, bland, and not known for their exciting or innovative formats. We needed to change this by thinking outside the box, and in doing so, strongly link associations between our innovative message and the innovative technology in the new X-Trail.

Describe the strategy.

We used one of the oldest advertising medium, to drive awareness and familiarity of one of Nissan’s smartest and most innovative intelligent mobility features. In 1980 George P. Lakoff published “Metaphors We Life By” a groundbreaking book which examined the way we gain understanding through an extensive system of metaphorical jumps between concepts. Our understanding is influenced and determined by our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand. To bring Nissan Intelligent Mobility to life in an easily understandable way, created a metaphor by predicting the upcoming radio spot and linking that to Nissan intelligent forward collision warning feature to cleverly demonstrate Nissan’s exciting and innovative technology.

Describe the execution.

To bring the idea to life we worked in partnership with our media agency to get a better understanding of if this could be done, and how we could use the message in our radio spot to predict the upcoming radio advertisement that would follow. While the names of brand advertising on the radio stations platform were confidential, they were able to share the categories those brand operated within. We identified the nine significant categories the radio advertisers operated in allowing us to make three generic versions of our radio spot to be played ahead of those advertisers. In total, 30 different versions of our radio spot were created each of them strategically slotted in front of the corresponding category our radio spot was referencing. The predictive radio spot was born, allowing us to communicate X-Trails intelligent forward collision warning feature to nudge people towards taking a test drive.

List the results.

The predictive radio spot was launched in the market on Monday, February 19th. As such, there are no tangible results recorded to date. Nissan sales centres are tracking consumer footfall and results are expected to be share in the coming months.

Credits

Name Company Role
Walid Kanaan TBWA\RAAD Chief Creative Officer
Manuel Borde TBWA\RAAD Executive Creative Director
Fouad Abdel Malak TBWA\RAAD Executive Creative Director
Oswaldo Sa TBWA\RAAD Art Director ACD
Pedro Velasquez TBWA\RAAD Art Director
Tarik Frank TBWA\RAAD Copywriter
Ghassan Kassabji TBWA\RAAD Managing Director
Richard Rao TBWA\RAAD Account Manager
Rouba Asmar TBWA\RAAD Head of Production
Romy Abdelnour TBWA\RAAD Corporate Communications Director
Hazem Atieh / Ezzat Habra TBWA\RAAD Creative Services Managers
Lucas Duque Sonido Audio Engineer
Garrett Olexiuk TBWA\RAAD Strategic Planner