This campaign is an ambitious venture into integrated marketing to a younger audience. The concept is simple: that the Sentra is a car so well equipped, you could live out of it. Simple, straightforward, easy to understand and well voiced to a target that likely spends a lot of their time using their car as a conduit for their lives.
What is refreshing is that all media touch-points drive toward the microsite. That makes plenty of sense. The rich media was robust and fun to play with, but lacked a compelling hook to get me interested. The spots were forgettable, but served to pique curiosity and drive traffic to the site. I hoped the blog would be great, but I found it to be a bit confusing-- on one hand, it's clearly a Nissan branded site, and on the other, it was an amateur-looking blog. In the effort to make the blog feel handcrafted, it became frustrating to piece together. The target audience is busy (they live out of their cars, remember?) and it takes something really hilarious to bring them back for more. Unfortunately, the videos were only mildly amusing, but not hilarious enough to truly go viral. The highlight of the blog was Horowitz's writing, which conveyed the most character of the whole campaign.
-- Dave Clark, interactive creative director, Draft FCB
Nissan's got a problem: how do you make a Sentra cool to cynical "young urbans" who crave authenticity? Let's see…you could use blogs, vlogs, user-generated content, webisodes, shared playlists, MySpace or maybe something viral people can share with a friend. Or you might want to try it all, which was Nissan's approach with "Seven Days in a Sentra." This campaign is nothing if not ambitious in its scope and use of non-traditional media.
The campaign centers around Nissan hiring Marc Horowitz, a 30-year-old comic, to live for a week in a new Sentra. He documented the experience with words, art and video and shared these on a blog.
There were a few really great moments here; spontaneous ones where Marc's personality shines through. Moments where we get to know and like Marc as a genuine person -- like the "Miracle of Mr. Seatbelt" video where Marc discovers if he attaches googly eyes to his seatbelt mount it transforms into a loveable muppet-esque character -- and the Sentra's image benefits by association. I also really liked the bit about the how the Cambodian tradition of having public restroom masseuses probably wouldn't fly in the U.S.
The problem was these genuine moments were exceptions. For the majority of entries it felt like Nissan was trying to exercise way too much control-- which is fine: a brand has every right to exert control over its marketing. What isn't fine is doing it in this context. If you are trying to reach a cynical audience, it is not a great idea to present them with user-generated content that feels like it is working from corporate talking points. Nissan has the right idea-- it just needs to trust its consumers and give up a little control.
-- Patrick Barrett, senior interaction designer, Bazaarvoice
