CARVANA x JIMMIE JOHNSON
CARVANA x JIMMIE JOHNSON
Marketing challenge: Build legitimacy, purchase consideration and leads within a coveted target of auto enthusiasts.
Brand challenge: As a new category entrant, we needed to credibly participate in the Indycar space and conversation while raising the bar for brand content in the category.
Solution: Leverage our tech and creative expertise to build an engaging 360-degree campaign experience for race fans.
One of the challenges for Carvana is the balance of continued, aggressive growth while maintaining efficiency in marketing spend. As efficiency in key channels decreased, we needed to identify either new, more efficient channels or develop alternative approaches to build brand awareness and purchase consideration amongst specific audiences which we believed represented greater upside than who we typically reached through mass media.
Jimmie Johnson’s rookie season in Indycar presented the perfect opportunity, a chance to reach an audience with greater passions and interest in autos/auto retail with one of the biggest players in the sport. In Jimmie we had the winningest NASCAR driver of all time, a racer beloved by his fans and true symbol of excellence. He’s a spokesperson with more than 50% national awareness despite ~20% of the country indicating interest in motorsports, talent who was able to reach far beyond his category.
More than that however, it was Jimmie’s story, his values, that aligned perfectly with our brand story. Jimmie was leaving NASCAR, a sport he dominated, to start over in Indycar. Jimmie’s motivation wasn’t to be the best in his sport, it was to be the best version of himself, needing to satisfying the drive inside him versus besting any competitor or sport.
Carvana took the same in its business. As we began to solidify our position as the emergent category lead, it escalated our need to continue to innovate, to go above-and-beyond in our customer service and aggressively pursue new audiences and opportunities.
It was out of this shared truth that No Finish Lines was born, kicking off a 6-month sprint to introduce our brand to this new audience through an innovative campaign designed to prove out just how differentiated we were from the rest of our category and any other advertiser in the space for that matter.
While we knew we wanted to tell Jimmie’s story, and the shared values behind No Finish Lines to build brand awareness, we also needed to use this partnership to drive an understanding in the value props that differentiate our business. With our :15 spots, running as a double-box feature alongside the actual race, we could highlight our brand benefits, driving consideration, familiarity and intent, through content engineered to supplement the viewing experience with an entertaining take on our business.
To engage our audience and capture leads, we offered race fans the chance to vote on the livery (car design) of Jimmie’s race car five times within the season. Through a combination of social posts and broadcast integrations with NBC, we drove fans to our campaign microsite to explore the vehicle designs and vote on their favorite. New emails were captured and added to a nurture campaign specifically developed for race fans who we believed to be higher up the funnel than our standard lead captures.
Email capture also gave us an important KPI for campaign success.
Once at the microsite, fans had the chance to explore the partnership in greater depth and some of the tech we’ve developed that makes shopping for a car online both safer and more fun.
