More car owners were choosing to buy counterfeit spare parts for their cars due to high prices and scarce availability of genuine parts, without realizing the consequences.

Nissan wanted to raise awareness about the dangers of counterfeit parts; this wasn’t coming from a standpoint that was fully commercial, but to educate all consumers, not just Nissan owners.

To do so, we needed to make consumers feel confident in making the right choice, rather than instilling fear and self-doubt like other brands did.

And making the right choice starts with asking one simple question: why?

When offered fake parts, costumers have two choices: buying into it or asking WHY the deal seems that good. A simple WHY has the power to skip a sequence of unfortunate events.

Nissan decided to leverage this insight and show that while some spare parts may not be genuine, consumers should be genuine in their questioning.

The film follows a reversed sequence of events, starting off with an improbable end result and going back to the trigger moment where a bad choice could have been prevented by simply asking one question: “Why?”

The film starts with Khaled, the protagonist, being arrested while being dressed up like a mummy, because he accidentally scared a group of children who thought he was a real mummy. The reason he was covered was because he was treated by a medical healer who found him unconscious in the desert, with his body full of cactus spines from falling into a pit of cacti, while being lost in the desert. It is then revealed that all of these events happened because when he was sold a counterfeit part, he “didn’t ask why”. The film then ends by encouraging consumers to “keep asking why”.

The films reached over 16.6 million unique users across different social platforms, with 425,000 engagements.

Consumers also highly resonated with the films, with 42,6 million views across all platforms (compared to a 6 million view objective), a 33% view-through rate on Meta (vs. 9% planned), and a 39% view-through rate on TikTok (vs. 11% planned)

This film was presented to Dubai Police for approvals, and what started as a standard approval process transformed into a partnership with them given that the film is raising awareness on a very important safety issue in the UAE.

Finally, and most importantly, Nissan saw a significant increase in genuine parts sales across different markets.