Nissan GT-R: The car as star

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Never mind the A-list celebs. Lately it seems that the newest velvet-rope crasher isn’t even human (of course, at times I wonder about some of the stars too)! No, the hottest guest at flashy Hollywood parties is the Nissan GT-R. Last week it was the video game rollout, and this week outdid even that bash.

Here’s the setup: I’m on a soundstage on the 20th Century Fox lot. It has been transformed into a nightclub with a concert stage. Drinks flowing with lighted ice cubes, photography from legendary rock ‘n’ roll photographer Jim Marshall hanging on the walls, and there, along with Paris Hilton, David Spade and the rest of the young Hollywood glitterati, a new GT-R is rotating center stage, while DJ Samantha Ronson is spinning. Then came a live performance onstage by Matchbox Twenty. This is one high-ticket party.

The GT-R event was part of a series of ‘Nissan Live Sets’ on Yahoo Music, and here’s the pitch: Have a live performance on this soundstage, attended by the most sought-after paparazzi prey. Stream it live on Yahoo Music and reach millions of people who love music, groove on spotting all the in-crowd celebrities and thus implant the cool factor of Nissan in their heads (in spite of what may have been implanted elsewhere). That’s real branding.

This led me to wonder why more manufacturers aren’t doing this sort of marketing as effectively. How do you get your company on the A-list? This event was perfectly designed to change the hipster mind-set. You have to spend money to get people to consider your product –- and perhaps that is exactly the question that’s being over-committeed (a lot of marketing isn’t so obviously efficient). Maybe it’s about risk taking. The suits in Detroit are all concerned about the concept of return on investment, or ROI. Problem is, parties like this are very expensive, and ROI is difficult to measure from such an event.

I talked to a lot of people at the event. Are they buying a GT-R tomorrow? No, they’re not, and in fact, they couldn’t get one if they wanted. But is Nissan on their list when they do go shop for a car? You bet it is now!

When the words ‘That car is hot’ come from the limited, albeit trademarked, vocabulary of Miss Hilton, watch out.

L.A. is the cultural fish bowl for marketing automobiles, and the red carpet photo area at the event had the Nissan and Yahoo logos all over it. All those TV stars in attendance will have a Nissan logo in the back of their latest press photos. It’s another little item for which ROI can’t be quantified. But, for sure, kids in Nebraska (or Newhall, for that matter) are aspiring just to be in the room with the ‘hot’ people, the ‘hot’ cars and the ‘hot’ band.

Nissan has done something smart here, and you can’t really measure it the way Detroit’s MBAs like to measure things. But in the big picture, it is easy to measure overall sales increases versus losses.

-- Josh Hancock