When the Nissan KICKS launched in May 2018, the brand had aspirations of creating a stronger connection with a younger audience. It’s a fun, colourful car with premium audio features, built for music lovers and those who value self expression. After two months in market, the launch was gaining momentum, but there was still a lack in awareness of the vehicle. With that in mind, we launched Twitter Test Drives to inject momentum into the launch, driving awareness, differentiating the vehicle from its competitors, and connecting to our audience.

As part of the launch for the Nissan KICKS, we gave our audience, music fans, a unique introduction to the car by letting them take it for a test drive on Twitter. We developed a new KICKS emoji, and on the biggest night in Canadian Music (the MMVAs), we let Twitter users build custom tracks inside tweets. And they did. They created tracks with epic jumps, loopdeloops, power-ups and of course, a lot of emojis. We responded in real-time with videos that showed the KICKS conquering their custom courses.

The KICKS was made for a younger buyer, in their mid-20s who value self-expression and creativity. Using our proprietary customer data tool, we identified music as one of their primary passions. Our target over-indexed as active users on Twitter and the Much Music Video Awards (MMVAs) was a singular moment when they collectively tune in. Younger shoppers no longer wish to be told what a brand or product stands for, they want to experience it themselves. But with customers spending less time at the dealership, it’s becoming more challenging for brands to provide these one-to-one experiences. The CTA was simple, use your creativity to build your own customer track and we would respond directly to you with your track expressed in a video. In this way, we’d introduce them to a new vehicle, and position it as fun, unique, and perfect for music fans.

For three days preceding the Much Music Video Awards, we seeded the idea of Twitter Test Drives on Twitter. A promoted trend introduced people to the car with a custom KICKS emoji that appeared when using our hashtag. And a first-view video promoted our live event that would take place during the MMVAs. The video gave simple instruction to build your track, starting with #NissanKICKS and ending with #MMVA. By having users tag every track with #MMVA, the visibility of the campaign grew exponentially. On August 26th, the night of the MMVAs, our in-house animators responded in real-time, creating videos that brought user-generated test tracks to life. Effectively, it was the first test drive you could take on Twitter. In the week following the event, we featured our favourites with Twitter promoted videos.

In just 5 hours, we amassed over 6.6 million impressions, 1.4 million video views and increased followers at 2000% the normal rate. With a 64.64% view rate and 169 direct mentions of the Nissan KICKS (12X the norm), we embedded the Nissan KICKS in Canadian music culture. Most importantly, those who viewed a video were 140% more familiar with the brand and 350% more favourable (Twitter Brand effect study). And while the execution was not designed to increase purchase intent, it did. By 200%.