ARCHIVE2024 Ford F-150 - Lightning - Ford | Clapboard Ad Archive
The 2024 Ford F-150 Lightning campaign for the United States market channels Ford’s celebrated...
How Nissan Micra Shed Its Granny Car Image in Ireland
Nissan's "No More Nice Car" is a 2017 digital film campaign created by Dublin agency In the Company of Huskies for the Irish market, designed to dismantle deeply held negative perceptions of the Nissan Micra and reposition it as a vehicle for younger, urban Irish drivers rather than the elderly audience with whom it had long been associated.
The campaign launches in Ireland in April 2017, coinciding with Nissan's introduction of a substantially redesigned fifth-generation Micra. The strategic challenge is immediate and specific: the Micra carries what the agency and Irish press consistently describe, as reported by the Irish Times and Little Black Book, as a "granny car" or "blue-rinse special" reputation accumulated over years of association with older drivers. That accumulated perception represents a structural barrier to conquest sales among younger Irish consumers, regardless of how significantly the vehicle itself has changed. The new Micra is a genuinely different product, but the name alone triggers premature dismissal.
In the Company of Huskies, working alongside media agency Spark Foundry, conceives a campaign that confronts the negative preconception head-on rather than ignoring it. The creative centre is a two-minute digital film directed by Dermot Malone and starring Isabel Lehane, a teenage taekwondo black belt from Ashbourne, County Meath, as documented by lbbonline.com. The film's narrative arc transforms the "nice" label — a word that Irish culture applies as mild, deflating damning praise — into a statement of rejection and reinvention. The campaign is built for a digital-first distribution strategy, targeting the generation next of Irish car buyers on the platforms they actually inhabit. The geographic focus is unambiguously Ireland; In the Company of Huskies develops the work independently of Nissan's broader European campaign infrastructure, treating the Irish market as a distinct cultural and commercial context requiring its own answer.
Nissan Ireland faces a positioning problem that a pan-European campaign cannot solve. Jonathan Forrest, Chief Executive of In the Company of Huskies, states plainly, as quoted by lbbonline.com: "The work we did was in response to a European campaign that we felt was a bit of a one-size-fits-all solution for European car markets." Forrest identifies a specific challenge in Ireland that demands a targeted response — a challenge rooted not in the product but in the cultural sediment of years of brand association with an older demographic.
The Irish small-car segment is competitive and crowded. The Nissan Micra's core competitive set in this segment includes the Volkswagen Polo, Ford Fiesta, Renault Clio, and Opel Corsa, according to data compiled by inthecompanyofhuskies.com, all of which carry less stigmatised reputations among younger Irish buyers. Against that competitive backdrop, a generic repositioning message would have no traction. The Micra's "nice car" problem is an Irish problem with Irish cultural specificity: in Ireland, being called "nice" is a form of polite dismissal, and the agency builds its entire creative platform on that local linguistic and cultural truth.
The strategic decision to develop an independent Irish campaign rather than localise the European creative reflects what Forrest describes, per lbbonline.com, as a willingness to take "informed risks." In the automotive industry, where campaign budgets are routinely centralised and local markets receive adapted global assets, the commissioning of an entirely original film for a single market represents a meaningful departure from standard practice. David Hayes, Director of social, search and performance media at In the Company of Huskies, indicates, as reported by lbbonline.com, that the team was deliberate in identifying where the media investment would deliver concentrated impact among the younger Irish urban consumers the campaign needed to reach. The Irish market's compact scale, relative to larger European automotive markets, makes concentrated digital targeting both practical and cost-efficient.
Dermot Malone directs the two-minute film at the centre of the "No More Nice Car" campaign, as documented by lbbonline.com. The film stars Isabel Lehane, a teenage taekwondo black belt from Ashbourne, County Meath — a casting choice that is itself a strategic statement. Lehane's identity as a young Irish woman who excels in a physically demanding, competitive discipline is the embodiment of the campaign's rejection of the "nice" label. She is not the demographic historically associated with the Nissan Micra in Ireland, and that contrast is the creative point.
The film's construction draws on documentary-adjacent aesthetic sensibilities, grounding its repositioning argument in observed reality rather than aspirational fantasy. The choice of a real teenager from a specific Irish location — Ashbourne, County Meath — rather than a model or actor performing youth anchors the campaign in the kind of specificity that Irish audiences, who are culturally attuned to the difference between authentic and manufactured Irishness, are equipped to read. The two-minute runtime is itself a creative commitment: in a digital advertising environment where skippable pre-roll dominates, a two-minute film requires the audience to choose engagement.
The campaign is distributed as a digital-first asset, and the platform strategy reflects the generation next targeting objective. In the Company of Huskies and Spark Foundry design the media plan to concentrate the film's reach among younger, urban Irish consumers rather than broadcasting it across demographically undifferentiated channels. The film generates 320,000 views within its first 48 hours of launch in Ireland, according to lbbonline.com, a figure that signals the creative is achieving the attention its runtime demands. The campaign ultimately accumulates 1.32 million video views, as reported by inthecompanyofhuskies.com, a substantial figure for a single-market automotive campaign in Ireland.
"No More Nice Car" wins the ADFX Grand Prix in September 2018, as reported by lbbonline.com and Adworld Ie, the most significant effectiveness award in the Irish advertising industry. The campaign also wins ADFX Gold in the Automotive category, according to adworld.ie. These awards are judged on demonstrated commercial effectiveness, not creative merit alone, making them a substantive validation of the campaign's market impact.
The commercial results are specific and independently reported. Nissan Micra's share of the Irish small-car market doubles from approximately 5% to approximately 10%, according to inthecompanyofhuskies.com. Ireland becomes the best-performing Micra market in Europe, as reported by inthecompanyofhuskies.com and Group1nissan Co Za. The comparative data is instructive: comparable European markets without locally developed advertising retain approximately 2 to 4% Micra share against Ireland's 10%, according to inthecompanyofhuskies.com, which positions the local campaign as a direct explanatory factor in the performance gap.
No verified independent audit of the view count figures beyond agency and trade press reporting is publicly available. Nevertheless, the structural logic of the campaign's effectiveness is clear: a precisely targeted, culturally specific creative asset deployed in a compact, digitally accessible market against a well-defined younger audience produces measurable share gains that generic pan-European campaigns do not replicate in Ireland. The Clapboard Score for "No More Nice Car" is 70 out of 100, reflecting strong strategic clarity and documented commercial impact tempered by the relatively narrow geographic scope of the campaign's ambitions and reach.
"No More Nice Car" is a 2017 digital film campaign created by In the Company of Huskies for Nissan Ireland. It repositions the Nissan Micra by confronting its "granny car" reputation among Irish consumers, targeting younger urban drivers through a two-minute film directed by Dermot Malone and starring teenage taekwondo athlete Isabel Lehane.
In the Company of Huskies created the campaign, working alongside media agency Spark Foundry. The film was directed by Dermot Malone and starred Isabel Lehane, a teenage taekwondo black belt from Ashbourne, County Meath. Jonathan Forrest served as Chief Executive of the agency at the time, as documented by lbbonline.com.
The campaign won the ADFX Grand Prix and ADFX Gold in the Automotive category in September 2018, according to adworld.ie and lbbonline.com. The ADFX awards are Ireland's premier advertising effectiveness awards, judged on demonstrated commercial results rather than creative execution alone.
Nissan Micra's share of the Irish small-car market doubled from approximately 5% to approximately 10% following the campaign, according to inthecompanyofhuskies.com. Ireland subsequently became the best-performing Micra market in Europe, compared with 2 to 4% share in comparable European markets that did not run localised advertising.
In the Company of Huskies determined that Nissan's European campaign was, in Chief Executive Jonathan Forrest's words as reported by lbbonline.com, "a one-size-fits-all solution" that could not address Ireland's specific cultural challenge — the Micra's entrenched "granny car" reputation — which required a locally developed creative response targeting generation next Irish consumers.
The film generated 320,000 views within its first 48 hours of launch in Ireland, according to lbbonline.com. It ultimately accumulated 1.32 million total video views, as reported by inthecompanyofhuskies.com, representing a significant reach figure for a single-market automotive digital campaign.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
