In the world of long-running advertising campaigns, there comes a moment when even the most comfortable premises require renovation — or, in this case, demolition.
Nissan, the automaker that has spent more than a decade housing former Heisman Trophy winners in a fictional dormitory for its college football sponsorship, is now moving the campaign outdoors. The Heisman House, that reliable television property where Tim Tebow and Eddie George and their fellow bronze-statue recipients engaged in sitcom-adjacent hijinks, will no longer serve as the setting for the brand's marketing efforts.
The cast, however, remains employed. Nissan is retaining its roster of former Heisman winners — a group that has grown and shifted over the years as new honorees joined and scheduling conflicts intervened — but placing them in scenarios designed to foreground the vehicles themselves rather than the comic circumstances of shared living.
It is, in other words, an attempt to remind viewers that Nissan is in the business of selling automobiles. (One might have thought the prominently displayed Rogues and Altimas had made this clear, but apparently not clearly enough.)
The shift represents a familiar tension in sports marketing: campaigns built around celebrity talent have a way of becoming about the celebrities, with the product relegated to the role of set decoration. For Nissan, which has been a sponsor of the Heisman Trophy presentation since 2005 and launched the Heisman House campaign in 2011, the franchise had become comfortable enough that it may have obscured the underlying commercial purpose.
Whether the new approach — Heisman winners, presumably, doing Heisman-winner things in proximity to crossover utility vehicles — will prove as durable as its predecessor remains to be seen. The House served Nissan well for many seasons. Now the automaker is asking its famous tenants to work without a roof over their heads.
Original story published in adage.com: "Nissan leaves Heisman House behind in NFL marketing shift - Ad Age"