I had no clue a simple editorial would result in this kind of response, but I’m nevertheless appreciative that I must have hit a nerve with some people, and that's always the intent of these things.
Jeremy MacKenzie’s “small town” advertising/sponsorship program is interesting, to say the least. He clearly understands that simply paying a racer to run a name and logo isn’t enough. HE, rather than the person he sponsors designs additional programs to maximize his exposure.
I have to ask: If Jeremy can see the value of working to enhance his sponsorship investment, I fail to understand why responders to these posts continue to insist that it’s NHRA responsibility to enhance the POWERade sponsorship rather than the other way around.
Like others who have posted on this thread I have worked in sponsorship acquisition on a part-time basis since the early 80s. I’ve had a few remarkable successes – and hundreds, if not thousands, of failures.
But in every instance in which I have been successful the companies I’ve worked with were not only prepared to spend additional dollars to enhance their direct funding efforts, they’d planned on doing so from the very beginning. They all knew that they couldn’t depend on a racer to enhance their exposure. They also knew that THEY had a heck of a lot better chance of enhancing those marketing efforts than did the racer himself.
Here’s where Jay Rathman is going to get angry with me again.
Jay, unless we absolutely KNOW the dollars involved in the POWERade/NHRA deal we’re merely speculating.
I agree in that we SUSPECT the price was dirt cheap, and POWERade’s actions – or lack thereof – since the deal was signed would tend to indicate that they could be thinking, “We didn’t pay jack for this deal, so it’s really not worth much, so we won’t do much to support it. We’ll see what it can do for us without our active support.”
I also agree that POWERade could easily make this a better deal for themselves, but apparently seem to feel that it’s not worth doing.
Jim Samuel, you’re right in suggesting that advertisers buy air time where the audience is, and don’t buy cheap air time in the hopes that they can somehow get the audience there to see their ads. That’s why the ads on the Super Bowl telecast are so high – they KNOW that’s where the audience is going to be.
Regarding team sponsorship situations, I think you have to take a little broader view. Simplistically, a racer’s goal is to learn how to drive the car, then learn how to race, and finally, how to win. Yes, he or she absolutely shows more potential value to a sponsor if he or she can demonstrate an understanding of marketing.
But, let’s say you’ve got a relatively young, good looking and well-spoken driver who shows tremendous promise as a racer, but has no understanding of marketing. Isn’t that driver still a potentially valuable investment because he or she can be trained in the marketing arts far more easily than he or she can be trained to drive a race car?
Jim, NHRA has been making an effort to increase brand awareness of the NHRA name. Our problem is that we don’t necessarily see the efforts they make in promoting the sport other than national event marketing.
I have a very strong difference of opinion with NHRA people regarding not necessarily their marketing/media efforts, but their promotional hires. I believe those jobs need to be filled with seasoned professionals making lucrative salaries, while they believe in hiring young people fresh out of school or with minimal work experience in the field, and paying them commensurate “starter” salaries.
I did not produce the 4 million new Winston customer number out of thin air. That’s the figure that was given to me by the last couple of people who ran the program. I’m assuming that SME/RJR is manned by some very competent people, but where they came up with those numbers is beyond me.
Regarding the Coca-Cola Family of Drivers, I viewed that program as one of personal product endorsements backed by national advertising to that effect.
Jim, I never suggested those drivers were unknowns. Coke obviously signed them for the very reason that they WERE already well known. But what made them well known were successes on the track and other promotional efforts, usually mounted by their individual team sponsors. You’re suggesting the drivers made the effort to make themselves more valuable, and to some extent a minority may have actually done so, but in the majority of cases it was some other entity besides the drivers who mounted those efforts.
No offense intended Jim, but name one title rights sponsorship that was put together by a track operator and not by the association.
Wow, Jim, you’re painting a picture of ego-driven corporate executives that I emphatically disagree with. Yes, certainly some guys are going to be boastful about their individual sponsorship deals, but if those corporations are making decisions based on potential results for their particular product or service, they may chose to get involved with wht some might call a "lesser" series. In other words, one company’s belief that a NASCAR program is right for them could just as easily be another’s belief that drag racing is the best arena for them.
Case in point: Some years back a low-buck stereo company had a major involvement with CART. I managed to get the CEO on the phone to talk up drag racing, and since I had nothing to lose I tossed into the conversation the fact that, at the time, the CART audience was perceived, and their marketing demographics showed (you can obviously skew any demographic study to demonstrate anything you want) that this was an upscale audience, one unlikely to purchase this guy’s bottom-of-the-barrel products.
He laughed and heartily agreed with me that drag racing would be a better place to spend his promotional dollars IF HIS INTENT WAS TO SELL PRODUCT TO THE AUDIENCE. It wasn’t. Their goal was to use the CART races as a hospitality tool with retail store owners. They’d found that by giving away tickets and hosting those people by wining and dining them and showing them the race, in the days and weeks following they would get better store display space for their stereo products, which in turn resulted in higher sales. He had the store-by-store, before-the-race and after-the-race numbers to back up his claim.
Now, in defense of Jim’s statement, I had a corporate executive tell me in no uncertain terms that his particular company’s decision to go NASCAR racing had been a gut decision by the top guy who liked the NASCAR atmosphere, liked being in the VIP suites and liked visiting with other corporate types. The guy I talked with feels his company could be better served in drag racing, but predicts that until there’s a change in upper management it won’t happen. He also said that he had no clue how they were justifying their massive NASCAR investment because they couldn’t prove it was doing them any good at all.
Just as we suspect with the POWERade deal, the guy also told me that on a dollar-for-dollar basis, even if they couldn’t prove that drag racing was doing them any good either, it would still be a better investment for his company because for one thing it would cost so much less.
Regarding Jim’s last statement about the days of corporate executives making decisions on personal likes and dislikes being over, I once again heartily and emphatically disagree. Maybe SMART companies don’t do that, but a heck of a lot of them still do.
In Jim’s later post, when he asks why companies would get involved if they then had to spend more money promoting that involvement, the money they spend doing that isn’t to promote the team, event or series, it’s to promote their own involvement in those activities. They’re (simplistically) saying to the public, “Hey, we’re a hot product and we’re associated with the very hot sport of drag racing.”
Jon Asher
