The Nissan Virtual showroom Mobile is a content platform designed to fill the gap between a car buyer’s need to research their purchase, and the brand’s desire to provide a rich experience for them.

Up until recently, Nissan had experienced a decline in visits to dealerships. This could be attributed to a number of reasons, the greatest being how easy it is to research online instead, and consumers’ fear of entering a dealership itself. Herein lay a strategic opportunity from which the Virtual Showroom mobile was born.

We figured that if we couldn't get everyone into our dealerships, we would bring the dealership to them, online, and in the number 1 destination for researching cars: YouTube.

Essentially, the Nissan Virtual Showroom is a website, or gadget, that lives entirely on Nissan’s mobile YouTube Channel (It is the first such custom mobile channel of its kind in Canada). Each car that you thumb through comes with clickable hotlinks that appear over the features of the car. Each hotlink serves up more in-depth content about the feature. All-in-all, these hot-spots link to over 76 individual pieces of content for over nine of Nissan’s core vehicles.

In addition to all this video content, the Showroom gadget allows you to see every car in full 360 views, as well as see your selection in every colour.

Because the Showroom is a platform that employs responsive design developed in HTML5, we are able to bring the dealership to any device, wherever our consumers may be. Whether you use an Android, or iOS smartphone or Tablet, you get the same rich experience as you would on the desktop. Smartphones are all about instant

gratification: so we added a geo-location functionality that allows you to find the nearest dealership from where you stand.

Ultimately though, the Virtual Showroom is a sales tool. Recognized by Google as YouTube’s first automotive retail showroom, we have seen over 22% return visits to the channel with users spending 2 1/5 minutes on the site watching the content hundreds of thousands of times. In the year since we’ve launched dealers have seen a significant increase in test drives, and more importantly quicker closing of deals as people arrive with their minds made up. Conversion rates, measured in clicking “Build and Price”, have averaged 17% with users of the mobile showroom, where the industry standard is about 9% in Canada.