How I helped change the World introducing Lead Gen on Facebook

In this article, I am going to share a story about how I changed the auto industry forever with Facebook ads. It all started in 2015 when I was a supervisor at Omnicom and we were spending an ungodly amount of money on advertising every day.

The Alpha for the Legion campaign:

One day, we got asked to be a part of the Alpha for the Legion campaign. Facebook came to us with a brand new idea of a lead gen ad, which allowed advertisers to take all the information that somebody puts into Facebook campaigns, such as their phone number, address, and email, and use it for a specific reason.

The Lead Gen ad unit:

At the time, there wasn't a Facebook pixel yet, and every action, every button on Facebook had its own bit of code. But we were still spending seven figures a day generating revenue. We immediately raised our hand and suggested using the lead gen ad unit for Nissan's new car, the Sentra.

Retargeting with lead gen ads:

We were running engagement campaigns to get people excited about videos and were trying to tie in Bluetooth information off of devices. What happens if you connect on Bluetooth to the register, or you're inside the area, and we can ping your location to understand that if we showed you an ad built around something, and then you took a transaction in a store, we could say theoretically what we were trying to do.

Fundamental shift:

The big idea that ended up changing the auto industry forever was running retargeting campaigns on our video view audience, engagers, and video viewers of the videos that we launched to get people excited about something. We hit everybody that we engaged with and watched those videos with an ad to say, Hey, do you want to run it? Do you want to set up a test drive today?

The impact of the lead gen ad unit:

The amount of test drives that Nissan was able to drive per market soared astronomically, and the conversion rate of people that bought the test drive car to actually buying the car basically stayed the same. We were able to tie back a media dollar to a click to a sale of something that would be 20, 30, 40,000.

We were able to fundamentally disrupt the entire auto industry with an ad that didn't exist. We experimented, measured, and found a gap in a way to use technology to solve a problem. The lead gen ad unit changed the way nearly every car dealership in the world conducted business. Now, every single car manufacturer runs paid media on the internet to get people to be interested in buying a car.