The automotive industry has continuously been developing new technologies to make driving safer & more exciting. Nissan is at the forefront of this technological development and has introduced a suite of integrated technology that’s designed to enhance safety, comfort, connection & control. This suite of technology comes under the umbrella of Nissan Intelligent Mobility (NIM) and most Nissan vehicles today are equipped with multiple NIM features. Through NIM, Nissan has successfully become the leader in electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles and vehicles with connected technology.
While this is great for the brand, the unfortunate reality is that the awareness of Nissan Intelligent Mobility at an overall brand level is very low (Nissan Brand track study). Simply put, we needed to get people to start seeing Nissan for what it really was by enhancing the awareness for Nissan Intelligent Mobility (NIM) and the key features that are available in Nissan cars today.
Describe the strategy
We were targeting the core car buying demographic of 18 – 35, glued to their phones spending up to 7 hours a day on their mobile phones (Source: YouGov). With so much time spent on social media, to engage with them, we needed content that’s thumb stopping, engaging & share-able.
While the purpose of the new high-tech features in cars is to make people’s lives easier, their communication is quite complicated – a matrix of lines, dots, robots etc. More the complication, more the feature is perceived to be high-tech, or that’s what the auto brands like to believe in.
We wanted to break away from this convention and present NIM in the simplest yet intuitive & engaging manner.
Minimalism is one of the hottest design trends of recent times and we wanted to leverage the ‘less is more’ philosophy to showcase Nissan’s innovative tech features.
Describe the execution
Our idea was to create a series of minimalistic, looping animation videos that showcase NIM features in the simplest way possible.
We showed the car as a simple moving marble sphere. To highlight and differentiate a car with NIM features, it’s shown as a translucent marble sphere with blue veining that comes to life when a NIM feature is activated. Other cars are showed as solid white or black marble spheres or stones.
The environment is a clean and simple world made up of simple geometric shapes – lines, curves, spheres and cylinders. Terrains are represented as natural textures of – marbles, sand, wood. The colors of the environment are subtle & subdued to highlight the sphere movements.
The movement in the world is paced in a very balanced manner without any sudden jerks or stops. Looping this video gives a smooth, continuous motion effect to the world.
List the results
The miNIMal videos were very well-received on Nissan’s regional social channels with KPIs exceeding benchmarks:
• Click through rate (CTR) – 30% higher than category benchmarks
• Cost per View – 50% lower than Nissan benchmarks
• Cost per engagement (CPE) – 30% lower than Nissan benchmarks
• View Through Rate (VTR) – 35% higher than Nissan benchmarks
Source: Media Agency Data