Aspiring actor Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes) has the worst agent! She constantly sends him all over town to the wrong auditions. We see Jack in his all new 2018 Accord as he finally has the opportunity of a lifetime—playing a Trophy in a Honda Accord commercial! Does his agent Myrna finally have it right?

The creators of Will & Grace developed a B-story line for star Sean Hayes in his iconic role of Jack. A longform :90 piece aired in a commercial break as an isolated pod, allowing for a seamless and commercial-free experience. An additional :30 piece aired across networks within the NBCU portfolio and outside of the show. A series of social and digital pieces pushed out from the entire NBCU portfolio's handles extended the story to achieve maximum reach.

The results of this custom content campaign exceeded expectations and showed noteworthy consumer engagement across platforms. The Honda Accord custom content delivered the highest search engagement for all automotive brands and increased Honda’s social fan footprint by +20% during launch week. Honda’s social synch post outperformed the average Facebook TV branded content by 9X. As a result of this partnership, Honda’s ad awareness increased by +42%.

Source: Nielsen Media Research, EDO, ListenFirst, and YouGov.

As the network television media model continues to evolve, finding ways for brands to speak to audiences in new and entertaining ways is key. For NBC, this means enhancing the viewing experience while at the same time ensuring our partner’s message is clear. With Honda, we ditched the old notion of running commercials in the commercial break; instead we produced a mini-show to help launch the new 2018 Accord.

By leveraging the cultural capital of the Will & Grace series relaunch, Honda would be able to shine a spotlight on the brand’s biggest launch of the year. Honda took full advantage of NBCU’s scale by activating a ‘symphony’ partnership—typically devoted to NBC-owned initiatives only—to elevate the profile of the Honda Accord.

For their biggest product re-launch of the year, Honda wanted to reposition the perception of Accord from being a ‘boring’ vehicle in a ‘boring’ segment to a stylish, exciting, and sophisticated model that is beyond what is expected. The mission proposed to NBC was clear: leverage the networks’ most anticipated fall series to tell the story of Accord in an entertaining and innovative way that was additive to the viewer’s experience.