How Nissan revs up its content-creation engine

Evolution: R&D and the "liberty to fail"

 

The founding premise was that churning out press releases, talking with the media on the phone or releasing ads was no longer enough to generate any sort of worthwhile engagement with target audiences, Sloan said. Instead, the media center set out to use a team, primarily from journalism, with "a higher ‘so-what?’ bar mentality" that would find story material and distil it into interesting storytelling that social media would potentially embrace.

 

As any journalist or content producer knows, that is no easy task, and in launching the center, Nissan achieved distinction as a company with a progressive approach to communications. But perhaps bolder still was the company’s acceptance that the media centre’s activities would not always work.

 

"What we’ve had is the liberty to fail, which is not a common phenomenon in corporates, and Japanese corporates in particular," Sloan said. "The mentality we came in with was kind of like a startup mentality. We needed success, but there was no template on how to get there. Thus it’s a bit of trial and error and you learn from when something doesn’t have an audience that you thought it would."

 

Sloan said he initially envisaged the production of much more written content, but the focus soon shifted to video when it became clear not enough people were engaging with Nissan-produced articles. Since then, the approach has been similar to that of R&D in a factory. The early days were about "content creation on a volume basis to show we could make it and do these things," Sloan said. That was followed by a concerted effort to learn the art of distribution, particularly on social channels — something that is still a work in progress. But the biggest shift has been from developing English-centric programming to content in a multitude of languages, including two dedicated channels in Japanese and Mandarin aimed at very specific audiences, such as dealerships.

 

Successful content cannot be predicted

 

The media center’s physical positioning at Nissan HQ is not just symbolic. On a day-to-day basis, Sloan said, the unit is engaged in the support of cross-functional teams. At any given time, the team might be covering an event, a new product launch, an auto show, a race or a visit from an ambassador such as Usain Bolt.

 

"All of those things are eminently packageable into content and can be livestreamed," he noted. "You can do it on a small scale, and because they’re social media-friendly, your audience, followers and fans will share and amplify, so we started doing things that were deeper stories abut what Nissan, Infiniti, and later Datsun [the team’s current focus] were all doing."

 

It’s hard to determine what will fly, though, and there have been surprises and disappointments. The first time Sloan said the team realized the potential to reach people on a truly large scale was when "Top Gear" picked up a short documentary on EV racing.

 

Sloan was only mildly interested when two of his staff pitched the idea to film developers at Nissan’s track in Chiba, just outside Tokyo. "They came back with a seven-minute piece, all in Japanese with subtitles — usually the kiss of death for an audience — but at the same time, EV racing was becoming a talking point," he recalled. "So completely without our enhancing or introducing, 'Top Gear' found this video and embedded it, taking it from a four-digit audience to something that hit close to six digits."

 

Since then, a piece of footage detailing a GTR breaking the speed record at the Nürburgring clocked up millions of views and stands out as one of the most successful to date. While that might have been a more sure-fire win, Sloan said in conclusion: "We’ve been at motorsports and seen a lot of different things take off, and sometimes it’s been a complete surprise to us. There’s certainly intelligence about best practice, which we listen to, but sometimes you’ve just got to take a chance, and the weird stuff works."