Nissan's Heisman Ads Return With a New Format — and a Sneak Role for the 2027 Rogue Hybrid
The 16th season of Nissan's Heisman campaign trades the Heisman House for a YouTube series in which seven trophy winners compete to be top spokesperson. The quiet star: the first US e-POWER hybrid.
Nissan's Heisman advertising is back for a 16th season, but the format has been rebuilt. The "Tell Them a Heisman Sent You" campaign that launches with Week 1 of college football on September 4 moves away from the long-running Heisman House format in favor of an episodic YouTube series, with 30-second cuts airing on ABC, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Amazon's Thursday Night Football throughout the season.
The premise this year is a competition: seven Heisman Trophy winners argue over who makes the best pitch for a Nissan, with a winner to be announced in an episode later in the season. The roster spans six decades of college football — Travis Hunter, Derrick Henry, Tim Tebow, Eddie George, Barry Sanders and Jim Plunkett — plus the campaign's newest addition, Fernando Mendoza, the 2025 Heisman winner who went No. 1 overall in the 2026 draft to the Raiders.
The car that matters here
The detail worth watching is the vehicle Mendoza is paired with. His episodes arrive later in the season alongside the all-new 2027 Rogue Hybrid, the first US application of Nissan's third-generation e-POWER system. It's a series hybrid: dual electric motors drive the wheels exclusively, with no transmission, while a gas engine works purely as a generator. Nissan has been selling e-POWER abroad since 2016, with nearly 2 million units in 68 countries, but the US has never had one.
The rest of the 2026 ad lineup is the current heavy rotation: the Frontier PRO-4X, the Rogue Platinum, and the three-row Pathfinder, each introduced with an award citation attached — USA Today's tailgating poll for the truck, a JD Power initial-quality win for the Rogue, an IIHS/Consumer Reports teen-driver nod for the Pathfinder.
Why Nissan is spending on football
The campaign lands at a moment when Nissan has a story to tell: the company describes itself as the fastest-growing mainstream brand in the US over the past 11 months, with 17 straight months of year-over-year retail sales gains. The Rogue Hybrid is central to keeping that going. Car and Driver reported in the spring that Nissan pulled the launch forward from early 2027 to October 2026 after the federal EV tax credit's elimination undercut its Rogue plug-in hybrid plans, because the brand currently sells no hybrid at all in a market where the RAV4 has gone hybrid-only.
College football is where Nissan has spent its media money since the first Heisman House spots in 2011, and pairing one of the most-watched sports on US television with its most important product launch of the year is not subtle. The full episodes land on YouTube as the season progresses.
