Europe's GT Academy Wins Two More Advertising Media Awards

The GT Academy is a racing driver discovery and training project by Nissan and Gran Turismo. The program has seen amazing success since its start in 2008 and has now been recognized by UK's foremost advertising industry magazine 'Campaign'. In the magazine's recent award ceremony, GT Academy won 'Gold Best Media and Entertainment Campaign' and 'Gold Best Transport Campaign'.

This comes as a welcome addition to the Cannes 'Gold Lion' award for 'Best Use of Branded Content' and Gold 'Best International Campaign' at the UK Media Awards earlier this year.

The 'Campaign' award panel summed up GT Academy as follows;

"NISSAN makes amazing sports cars but lacked the heritage and fanatical following of other marques. At the same time, SONY PlayStation® was looking at how to broaden the appeal of its Gran Turismo®5 game to non-traditional gamers.

The result was the Nissan PlayStation GT Academy, a global initiative to find a brilliant Gran Turismo gamer and turn them into a racing driver to compete at the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Twenty gamers were taken to an intensive training school at Silverstone, where their progress was recorded and made available online. At the same time, journalists were invited to take part in a similar academy, ensuring mainstream and specialist press coverage.

Footage was turned into a 6 part television series broadcast on Channel 4 and distributed to 160 countries. Estimated global media value of the campaign is more than £30 million."

The 'GT Academy' has attained remarkable achievements on real life tracks, with the first GT Academy Winner Lucas Ordonez claiming 2nd place at the Le Mans, and winning the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup title. The second year winner Jordan Tresson has also won the Blancpain Endurance series this year. The awards received today are victories off the track, in recognition for the efforts made by all those involved in this project.