Every March, House of Highlights (HoH) has established itself as one of the main accounts for fans to come and catch up on the latest action from the NCAA March Madness Tournament. To celebrate the tournament, Nissan partnered with House of Highlights with the ultimate goal to increase the company’s relevancy and position it as the most thrilling choice for a new generation of drivers. With HoH being one of the primary destinations for the next generation of sports fans, this was a match made in heaven, combining the objective from Nissan to reach a younger audience with the expertise that House of Highlights brings to the table.
This creative activation allowed Nissan to create the Nissan Fan Cave where all of the content used in the social campaign was shot featuring two of the top digital influencers in Kenny Beecham and Jenna Bandy. These interactive executions with Kenny and Jenna in the Fan Cave helped create a custom presence for Nissan that passionate fans could engage and interact with the most. Taking advantage of the popularity of Instagram with the younger audience, Nissan and HoH utilized content from the Fan Cave on both IG timeline and IG stories. Whenever there are multiple parties involved it can be difficult for everyone to reach the goal. However, the audience demographic that House of Highlights boasts and the goals that Nissan outlined for March Madness made it that much easier of an objective to achieve for both parties.
When bringing this branded content to life, House of Highlights worked alongside Nissan to prepare this campaign that centered around the NCAA March Madness Tournament. The first step was to decide which influencers to be featured in the campaign. With multiple influencers to choose from for the Nissan Fan Cave, HoH ultimately decided to rely on the voice of basketball for Gen-Z fans and one of the most popular basketball influencers on social media to help lead the charge. By being featured in the Nissan Fan Cave, Kenny Beecham and Jenna Bandy both were able to tap into their skill set and produce content that they are well known for across their social platforms. From spirited shooting competitions and trick shots on the garage mini-court to basketball highlight reactions, HoH and Nissan were able to highlight everything the Fan Cave had to offer in front of the HoH community and ultimately the desired next generation of drivers.
One of the primary decisions HoH had to make was outlining and executing the creative idea that the company would use when shooting a campaign that would feel native to the HoH audience while spotlighting Nissan as well. As a popular influencer, Jenna Bandy is well known for her handles, trick shots, and other skills on the basketball court, and her talents were heavily used while filming as she competed with Kenny in a classic game of H.O.R.S.E. outside of the Nissan Fan Cave driveway with Nissan vehicles and branding strategically placed in each camera angle. While Kenny is popular in the basketball space across social media, Jenna has far more experience in the sport and proved to have a drastic advantage over Kenny which revealed the primary challenge of the campaign in figuring out a creative angle to tap into Kenny’s talents and strengths as well.
In an effort to make compelling content that consisted of more than just clips of Jenna taking advantage of Kenny on the court, HoH provided him with the opportunity to add his knowledge and commentary of the game on the court as he broke down the tape and highlights of the top college basketball players throughout March Madness during his own content piece in the Fan Cave. Kenny has built his reputation off of his reactions and breakdown of the NBA and basketball culture, and having him set up inside the Fan Cave and create this additional creative content piece for Nissan, helped create a successful branded content campaign for both HoH and Nissan.
The Nissan Fan Cave activation exceeded all of the team objectives by becoming the #1 performing sponsored video on all of Instagram in 2021. Jenna and Kenny were able to deliver content that resulted in major wins by generating compelling content on both IG stories and IG timeline for HoH. Jenna and Kenny’s game of H.O.R.S.E. on IG stories racked up 203K engagements and 820 swipe ups that led users directly to Nissan’s website. On IG timeline, Jenna and Kenny both shined again with Jenna’s trickshot videos earning 2.9M views/157k engagements (the most-viewed branded content video on IG in 2021) and Kenny’s March Madness highlight breakdowns which brought in 465k views/43k engagements. These two influencers provided everything HoH and Nissan were looking for and more by ultimately drawing in 3.8M IG stories impressions that over-delivered for the campaign at 132%. Not to mention, the campaign was also able to earn 4.7M social views from timeline posts that over-delivered for the campaign at 101% creating one of the most successful campaigns for House of Highlights.
