In 2009, I was invited to be part of a very small creative team with a monumental task: to launch the world's first mass-market electric car. Without much guidance from Nissan, we bootstrapped a rigorous research and strategic plan. The result was an extensive campaign— with hundreds of touch points—that would geek-out the early adopters and prepare the fast followers.
Early adopters crave their dinner-party talking points. So we created a suite of videos and interactive graphics—we called it "sexy science"—to give them the goods. Many of these benefits seem obvious today, but in 2010, we were breaking new ground.
Massive car companies typically don't let their agencies get this close. Example: a little icon I sketched (combining an "e" for electricity with the universal "power on" symbol) became the official badge for Nissan electric vehicles worldwide.