eRacing Magazine Vol. 1 Issue. 6 | Page 59

Nurbürgring having a big presence of owners there.

“That calling-card as we have via the GT-R, will expand to the NISMO brand, bringing in a NISMO club if you will. It is a part of the fan base, but we want to extend it past GT-R because last year, we sold around 5,000 NISMO Jukes. Suddenly, we had people that had never owned a NISMO or ‘performance’ car before, who have now got that badge on their car and we can utilize that as well.”

Any major decision for a major player like NISSAN to embark on a global project like a LMP1 campaign has many different factors that must be considered. However, it was the “easiest decision we have ever taken,” according to the man that took that bold gamble of creating GT Academy six years ago, which had one of its best figures of 27 million viewers in Germany back in 2012.

“The reason for that is in terms of the old way of reviewing investment is easy. You get a REPUCOM study from Le Mans, where a brand will get a certain amount of time on screen. So the bean counters sign it off. We had a 10 to 1 return on investment, as RTL, who films GT Academy for us, ran the show before Grand Prix qualifying. But who would have though that would happened when we launched it?”

The interaction is something that Executive Vice President Andy Palmer is interested in from an awareness perspective, as social media is a major way for entities to heavily interact with the fans: “Andy himself will say, ‘I don’t want that REPUCOM study. I want to see what the fan engagement is, how many tweets, how many FB fans have we got, how many of our dealers are at those events?’