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MALE SPEAKER: The thought leadership program is
something that we care very, very deeply about, and we work
the year around to put this program together there.
It's a very ambitious program, as many of you know.
There are almost 100 seminars.
And we try very, very hard to reinvent this
completely each year.
And part of that reinvention for 2010 involves engagement
of new partners, who we see as real leaders in the business
of working with brands, building loyalty, and
delivering results for their partners.
And if you were doing an unfiltered national survey of
who's getting it right and who delivers, NASCAR would
certainly be very high, if not at the very top of that list.
So when we first met through some old colleagues of ours--
we met Andrew and a whole bunch of people at NASCAR,
Chad and a great, great group, Jill--
8, 9, 10 months ago and conceived of a presence for
NASCAR during Advertising Week, I must tell you that we
were over the moon.
We're thrilled to have them here.
This is going to be really, really, really I think neat,
and you guys made a great decision to be here.
So without further ado, Advertising Week is thrilled
to welcome NASCAR and NASCAR--
Life in the Fast Lane.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MIKE JOY: Good morning and welcome.
Thanks for joining us this morning.
I'm Mike Joy.
I am the anchor for Fox Television's NASCAR coverage
for the decade that they've been involved in the sport.
And like most of the folks on the panel, I've spent my whole
life in this sport, and there is nothing like it.
Let me introduce our panel to you.
At the far end of the stage is a gentleman best known for
winning the Daytona 500, the sport's signature event, not
once but twice.
He has since transitioned into the car owner's role and
fields a two-car team in NASCAR's premier series, the
Sprint Cup Series.
And he occasionally dusts off his helmet, as he'll do later
this month at Talladega, and take another run at the boys
in the fast lane.
Please welcome from Owensboro, Kentucky, Michael Waltrip.
[APPLAUSE]
MIKE JOY: So Michael will be talking to us mainly about the
team ownership side of NASCAR, and the opportunities, perils,
and pitfalls that are presented there.
In the middle of the panel, John Aman is the Vice
President of Strategic Sponsorships
for Nationwide Insurance.
A couple of years ago, Nationwide replaced 25-year
sponsor Busch Beer as title sponsor of NASCAR's
second-tier series, now the NASCAR Nationwide Series.
So John, welcome this morning.
John Aman.
[APPLAUSE]
MIKE JOY: Our third panelist to many of you needs no
introduction, because on the high-flying world of
motocross, he is named by his peers and by everybody around
the sport as simply the greatest of all time.
15 AMA Pro Championships, 150 feature event wins, and then
he hung up his helmet and came over to the four-wheel side.
He's a regular in the Camping World Truck Series, and he's
going to join the Nationwide Series this week in Kansas,
Ricky Carmichael.
[APPLAUSE]
MIKE JOY: NASCAR's success story is a short one in the
world of professional sports.
In 1949, NASCAR held its first sanctioned race.
It began on the dusty dirt tracks of the South, and the
sponsors on the side of the cars were local businesses,
usually the business of the car owner, who diverted some
of his funds from his business to racing.
Or they were gas, tires, and oil, and car manufacturer
sponsorships.
NASCAR very quickly moved to radio, television, and into
the supermarkets of America.
It has been an unbelievable ride in a very short time.
If you turn your attention to the video screen, we'll give
you a quick look at what NASCAR is all about.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Getting set to watch some good old NASCAR.
-No mistakes.
Just do what you're supposed to do.
-Let's go!
-Teams have been waiting, working hard,
preparing for this day.
43 of the world's best drivers.
-Fellows, here we go.
-Green flag, clear!
-Three in line.
-That's what it's all about right here.
-Try and win this thing.
-Grandstands come to their feet.
-There's trouble on the back straightaway.
Collected another one behind him.
-It will be a wild finish, going to get crazy.
-Yeah, it's going to get a little interesting.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
MIKE JOY: Exhale.
That's typical.
That's not the greatest hits or the
highlight reel of the season.
This is what happens every week throughout NASCAR's three
major series and on its local home tracks, a couple in New
Jersey, one on Long Island, and a few in Connecticut.
NASCAR is the number one form of motor sport in America.
It's the number two regular season sport on television to
the National Football League.
Millions of fans from all walks of life, and I think one
thing that separates us from many other traditional sports
is that every race is an all-star game.
You see all of the sport's top stars in every single race 36
times a year in the case of the Sprint Cup Series.
And the fans have a loyalty that is unparalleled in sport.
The drivers make it happen.
They are unique personalities, and the fans have just an avid
following of their favorite driver.
If a driver switches makes of cars, fans will go to the
dealership.
They'll trade in their Chevrolet, and they'll buy a
Toyota, or a Ford, or whatever their favorite driver is with.
And the sponsor list of NASCAR begins at the top with the
monolith companies like Budweiser, Target, FedEx, UPS,
Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, all the way down.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: NAPA.
MIKE JOY: Yeah, Michael's personal sponsor, Aaron's
Sales and Lease.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: Aaron's, NAPA.
MIKE JOY: NAPA, for whom he won the Daytona 500.
And you'll hear a list--
MICHAEL WALTRIP: Best Western.
MIKE JOY: --as we go through, because NASCAR's drivers are
consummate pitchmen, and it really works.
Now, at the other end of the scale, smaller companies, very
small companies, have found a good fit with NASCAR.
In the sleepy little town of Chester, Connecticut, there's
a company called Whelen Engineering that makes the
emergency lights for police, and fire, and rescue, and
construction equipment.
They're a big sponsor of NASCAR.
And broadcast favorite Beaudreaux's Butt Paste from
Louisiana sponsors a car in the Nationwide Series.
It's diaper rash cream.
Not one of Michael's personal sponsors, but he has a great
list.
Let's move to our panel.
Michael, let's start with you.
In a long career of driving that began in NASCAR's Baby
Grand Series, a stint of living and working with
Richard Petty, and moving now to team ownership, you have
always been able to deliver for your sponsors.
And even in a season if you didn't win a race, you would
still lead the league in maximizing sponsor investment.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: Well, the fact that they wanted to be on
the side of my race car, and that allowed me to go race, I
had a debt of gratitude to anyone that would do that.
And I think that's evident by the longevity that I've had
with my sponsors.
NAPA began sponsoring my car in 2001, and they're still
there today as a major sponsor of my car.
Coca-Cola, Aaron's, Best Western, Freightliner, Toyota
now since '04, all these companies are more than just
my sponsors.
They're my partners.
If I come up with some idea of something I want to do as a
car owner, I give them a call, and we
talk about it as partners.
And so in my case, it isn't just writing a check.
It's more about how we can maximize those.
And once they commit to sponsor our cars, then I feel
like no matter what level of commitment it is to the team,
I feel like they've bought in, and anything I can do 24/7
during the course of a week, then I'm willing to and want
to do it for them.
Because I feel like if they spend $100, and I over-deliver
to them, I can get $200 next time.
And racing is a very expensive sport.
Those cars you saw crashing on that screen cost probably over
$150,000 each, and you need a whole garage full of them.
We have all that back in North Carolina.
We have a budget of close to $87 million to race our cars
for the course of a season, and with a budget like that,
you certainly have to have a lot of sponsors.
The purses in the races certainly get your attention.
It's a lot of money to win.
But it nowhere near covers the cost of what it
takes to race a car.
So someone like me who grew up in the '70s racing, beginning
my racing career, I know the value of a sponsor, and I
appreciate their participation in our team.
And I'm there for them no matter what the question is.
MIKE JOY: You've had a wide range of sponsors on your
cars, from Motorola to lemonade and just about
everything.
Give folks an idea of the companies that are involved
with the 230 employees of Michael Waltrip Racing.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: Well, I mentioned all of them, and I
tend to do that.
I don't know, sometimes I say sponsors over and over again.
But Toyota is the cornerstone of Michael Waltrip Racing.
We race three cars in the cup series, and Toyota is the car
that we race.
NAPA Auto Parts and Aaron's Sales and Lease Ownership,
they've been with me the longest, and they're the two
major sponsors of our team.
But we also have Tums that sponsors our cars, and just a
great list of names, iconic names across our world that
you know, and they've chosen to spend some marketing
dollars in our sport.
And I just can't express to you how much that
they make it work.
NAPA, I'm sure they like me OK, but 10 years of spending
millions of dollars, they don't do it
because they like me.
They do it because they've found that the NASCAR fans,
like Mike said, are avid about what we do, and they want to
support the companies that support us.
Over the last year or so, I've gotten into the whole social
media thing, Twitter specifically.
When I first heard about it a little over a year ago, they
said it's a chance for people to find out what you're doing.
And I had a few things going on.
I really didn't want people knowing what I was doing.
But when I started investing a little bit of time in it, my
numbers grew really quickly of race fans that just wanted to
have that connection.
And that's exactly what a team owner or a race car driver has
to have to the fans.
They have to feel like they know that guy.
And if they know that guy, they're going to support his
initiatives.
And my initiatives are weekly to make sure that my sponsors
are taken care of.
And I do that via Twitter and Facebook.
We have a very aggressive social marketing program at
Michael Waltrip Racing, I'd say the best Facebook team
page in all of NASCAR.
So it's just that, Mike.
It's just a chance for people to get to know who you are,
appreciate--
like I get a note from NAPA, we've got oil filters
on sale this week.
You got anything for us?
What can you do?
And so the notes come specifically for me.
Go to NAPA and get you an oil filter.
And by the way, maybe pick up some brake pads
while you're there.
I don't know what all you might have going on.
But that's exactly how I've chosen to engage my sponsors
into our team so that they want us to deliver for them.
MIKE JOY: This sport, as you saw from the video, is so full
of sponsorship.
Is it hard to stand out?
Is it hard to make your sponsor stand out from the
crowd in delivering and getting that message across?
MICHAEL WALTRIP: Well, we've learned over the years.
Used to, you had a sponsor.
That's the way it was when I first started racing.
You tried to have a sponsor for the year.
And that maybe cost a million dollars or
two back in the day.
But now, the budgets per car have grown past $20 million.
So teams began to figure out that one company
might want ten races.
Another company might want five or six.
So it's more difficult now, I think, than ever to make sure
those companies stand out.
But if you're able to accomplish that, then that
sets you ahead and above the rest. And I think that's all
of our goals.
Like I said, whether someone spends $100 in the sport or $1
million in the sport, they're in.
That means they have a conduit to all of what Michael Waltrip
Racing is about, and all of what NASCAR is about.
And so you just have to make sure that you understand that
just because one spends a little more than the other,
that doesn't mean that the one that spends
less gets less attention.
It's like kids.
You have one, and you think you couldn't love anything
better in the whole world.
I'm comparing my sponsors to kids, so if y'all wouldn't
write this down, I'd appreciate it.
I'm just making a point.
But then you get another one, and you love it, too.
And so that's what sponsorships
are like in our sport.
You've got to take care of them all.
And you can't just be the guy that stands up and says, I
want to thank da, da, da, and be done with it.
You got to be innovative.
You got to figure out a way to spread your message.
The best way to spread it is by winning.
But like Mike said, I've raced a lot of races.
In a lot of those seasons, I didn't win, but I still was
focused on delivering to my partners the value that they
signed up for.
They would rather me win maybe, and not do that.
But you can't win them all, so I made sure that the win was a
bonus, and they knew that they were going to get coverage and
appreciation from me whether I won or not.
MIKE JOY: How much of your sponsors' efforts would you
say go toward marketing to the public, to the fan?
And what percentage goes toward marketing to the key
clients they bring to the races and establishing
business-to-business relationships at the races?
MICHAEL WALTRIP: Well, business-to-business
relationships at Michael Waltrip
Racing, that's my passion.
I love the fact that we can bring Toyota, New Balance,
Tums, Aaron's, all those folks, and set them in a room.
And don't write this down either, but you think it's
like a pyramid scheme almost. Those aren't legal.
But you get everybody together, and you just talk
about how you can drive your business, what Aaron's can do
that might--
a great example was Domino's Pizza sponsored
us a few years back.
They went to one of our other sponsors, Best Western, and
they said, we want to put Domino's Pizza logos on your
door keys so that people will see that and
maybe go buy a pizza.
And we helped form that relationship.
And that made Ty Norris, everybody that worked at our
shop say wow, this is a perfect example of how we can
help our partners drive business.
And now there are many, many more examples of that.
And every six months, we get together with all of our
partners and do just that.
I'd say it's 50/50, Mike.
I think that the sponsors want to entertain customers, and
they want to entertain their employees at the races.
But I've been real fortunate.
The reason why people know about me more so than maybe
what I've done on the track is because of the fact that my
sponsors have always made commercials.
They wanted to engage the fans through TV commercials, and I
was the fortunate guy that was standing there
and got to make them.
MIKE JOY: All right, let me turn to John Aman with
Nationwide Insurance, which replaced Busch Beer as sponsor
of NASCAR's number two series.
I remember 15, 20 years ago, NASCAR made a big run at car
insurance companies and said, we'd really like to have you
part of our sport.
Well, you saw the video.
Cars crash on the race track, and a lot of insurance
companies, in fact, back then all the insurance companies,
felt that wasn't a very good fit.
What changed, and what brought you to NASCAR?
JOHN AMAN: I think you're illustrating exactly the
argument that we had to make four years ago when we wanted
to get into this sport, and we were walking it around to our
executives.
On the positive side, we say there's 75 million fans.
If we go in and sponsor the series, we can have business
relationships with all the teams, talk to them, figure
out how we can help expand their business,
if there are ways.
But on that negative side of the ledger was hey, but don't
those cars go fast, and they run into each other?
And we had to get to a point, well, yes, but we can use that
as a metaphor about what we do every day.
People unfortunately have accidents every day, and we
put those cars that they have back in the condition they
were before that accident, or we replace them.
And that's the way it happens with Michael and his cars.
He doesn't want to run too many of them into a wall.
But when it happens, he's got to put it back together.
So we look at it, as your opening statement said, 75
million fans.
This is the number one motor sport in the country.
It's the number two sport on TV. The Nationwide Series is
the number two motor sport there is.
We're fortunate.
We're seeing some bump up in ratings over the last couple
years, so more and more people are paying
attention to this series.
And that is why we thought it was a good place to go.
MIKE JOY: But how's it going?
JOHN AMAN: It's going well.
What we need to do in our business is first see that the
fan becomes more aware of us and will consider us more than
they did before.
So we've seen a 50% increase in that awareness with the
race car fan, with the NASCAR fan, in particular.
That's huge, because to get people to buy us, they first
have to know of us.
And we've also moved consideration significantly.
And as we fall through what we call our purchase funnel, we
end up seeing more people give us their contact information,
and more people complete quotes and become
policyholders to the point where we're at least a year
ahead of what our return on investment stated we needed to
be from a break-even standpoint.
So we turned that corner beginning of this year.
We were planning on turning it beginning of the fourth year.
So it's working out very well for us in that regard.
MIKE JOY: One thing I've seen that's interesting, just
anecdotal evidence, since you've become involved in the
sport, now it seems that all of your agents' personal cars
are wrapped.
They look like race cars out on the street.
Is that coincidence or not?
JOHN AMAN: I'm not sure that's coincidence.
I think I was getting phone calls asking for permission to
do that within hours of the announcement, saying is it
possible to wrap my car?
And we have a show car program where we wrap a couple cars
and travel them around the country about 400
event days a year.
And our agents are the ones that are
subscribing to that program.
They see that car roll into their neighborhood event, and
they say, you know, I'd like to keep some
element of this here.
So they go out and wrap their own car and make it present in
their neighborhood.
MIKE JOY: Neat.
Ricky, after the greatest career anybody's ever had on
two wheels, you hung up your motocross
helmet and came to NASCAR.
What brought you here specifically?
RICKY CARMICHAEL: Well, I grew up racing against Clint Bowyer
in motorcycle racing.
And I got hurt in 2004 and had to have my left ACL repaired.
So I missed the supercross season that year.
And I went down to the Daytona 500, and man, was that an
experience.
Living in Florida, being a Florida native, I went there
and went to watch Clint.
Well, I met a bunch of other people,
Kasey Kahne to be exact.
I met him through a mutual sponsor, Oakley.
And a couple months later, I got a call from his manager
asking if I would want to drive the late model.
Kasey was working on a few things.
And to make a long story short, that's how
this journey began.
I had signed a three-year contract with Suzuki.
And at the end of that three years, which would have been
in 2007, I was going to retire and be done with it.
And this just happened to fit perfectly within the time that
I was quitting motocross.
MIKE JOY: Your sponsor, Monster Energy Drink, part of
Hansen Beverage, it's known as a lifestyle brand.
It's had phenomenal growth.
What do you specifically do to help them
advance their agenda?
RICKY CARMICHAEL: Well, I joined forces
with Monster in 2005.
They were just coming into the motocross industry, actually
just building their brand.
As you said, they're a very young brand and doing very
good for themselves.
And I met the main people in charge and just started the
relationship there.
And through my whole career of motorcycle racing, I've always
been a very loyal person to my sponsors and wanted to do the
best for them, kind of like Michael.
I have that bond with them, and I'm a personable person.
So that was my deal, is I wanted to make them happy.
And I was able to win races.
That always makes it better.
And as I started the transition, I asked them if
they would be willing to come with me.
They feel that NASCAR is a place that they know
they need to be.
Their archrival is in that sport.
I'm not going to say their name.
I think we all know who it is, but they are better and bigger
than them domestically and hopefully
worldwide here very soon.
So they said yes, and here we are.
And for us, it's a very good bond and a very good
relationship that we have. Like you said, it's a
lifestyle brand.
And for me, I feel that I am branded to them.
When you think of Ricky Carmichael, you think of
Monster Energy.
And I think any sponsor that I've had in motorcycle racing,
when you think of my name, you associate me with that brand.
And I try to do that for every single sponsorship that I
have, and I think that it's very important.
MIKE JOY: So what types of activities
do you do for Monster?
And let's kind of compare that with some of the things that
Michael does for his sponsors.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: We do a lot of Twitter, like he said.
I think we have a good time with Twitter.
The fans love it.
Like he said, they have that connection.
And I think that's the next deal, is making your fans feel
like they're a part of you and being with you, telling them
what's going on.
And hey, check out this new Monster flavor that's coming
out and stuff like that.
Another thing I will say that is cool about NASCAR, which I
think has a lot of value to sponsors compared to
motorcycle racing, is the fans are very, very loyal.
Motorcycle racing, if you aren't really in the top two
or three, really you are kind of forgotten about, which is a
shame, because there's a lot of great talent out there.
Where in NASCAR racing, I led my first lap ever in NASCAR
this weekend in Vegas.
And so I haven't won races, but I still feel that I'm very
fortunate and have a lot fans and a good following.
So that's my approach.
I try to make them feel as one.
MIKE JOY: So you're doing commercials.
You're doing personal appearances.
I understand now there is an apparel chain called Lids,
which deals mainly in caps, and that in the last reporting
period, for the first time ever, a non-baseball cap was
their number one seller.
Now, of course, with baseball, a Yankees cap, no matter who
your favorite Yankee is, that's the cap to wear.
There's only one cap.
There's 25 people on the New York Yankees.
Your cap was the number one seller in the most recent
reporting period over all team caps.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely.
That's something I'm very proud of.
We all know at Lids how many hats they have and how many
teams and logos are on those hats.
So for Monster's brand and my likeness on there to be a
number one seller, that's pretty neat.
And it's just a testament to our hard work and
NASCAR's hard work.
And all the TV time that we get in making myself and the
Monster brand recognizable, I think it's pretty neat.
And for as young as I am in this sport, I think I've been
able to definitely overdeliver.
That's always my job.
And like Michael said, if you can win, that's just kind an
added bonus.
So it's something that I never dreamed of, but--
[PHONE RINGS]
MIKE JOY: Sorry, it's my Sprint phone.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: I'm sorry about that.
MIKE JOY: You have the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, so--
RICKY CARMICHAEL: But for where I'm at in NASCAR and
making the transition, I really have to appeal to the
fans and make my sponsors proud since I'm not
winning races yet.
So I really try to overdeliver in that aspect,
get as much TV time--
[PHONE RINGS]
RICKY CARMICHAEL: And this guy's blowing up here.
MIKE JOY: Yeah.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: He's a popular guy.
MIKE JOY: Well, they spend a lot of money.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: They do.
But that's my whole deal.
And it always helps to have a good sponsor.
And another thing that I think is good on
my behalf is I can--
[PHONE RINGS]
MIKE JOY: Oh, for crying out loud.
I'm going to kill this.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: Yeah, that phone, it might be timely.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: That's right.
I'm able to do a lot of cross-promoting through what I
was able to accomplish in motorcycle racing to what I'm
able to do now in NASCAR racing.
I feel that I've been able to bring a lot of fans from the
motorcycle world to NASCAR and have a good following, which I
think for me is a great marketing tool.
And I try to use that to my advantage.
And at the end of the day, I enjoy to do it just like
Michael does.
I think some of it has to do with the way
that we were raised.
We're very personable people, and we always want to
overachieve.
And that's what I try to do.
MIKE JOY: Let's talk a little about the challenge of
marketing to the urban consumer.
There's a lot of cars in New York City.
They're mostly all yellow.
They have numbers on them, but the number is on a medallion.
It's not a big two-foot-tall number on the side.
So how are we doing at reaching the fan in the city
as opposed to the fellow who maybe has got a Camry back
home, Michael, or he's got a Tundra, and he's much more of
a driver than the folks are in the big urban areas?
MICHAEL WALTRIP: I just think it's really important to try
to be innovative.
And like we've talked about already, social marketing,
that media network gives you the opportunity to do that,
and reach people that you wouldn't
have reached otherwise.
And also, we have to be innovative with how we focus
our team's marketing dollars, how we're going to try to take
our sponsors and put them in places they
haven't been before.
And I do that pretty regularly.
If there's a NAPA store anywhere around, and I'm going
somewhere, sometimes I'll walk in there and just say hi.
And they'll look at me kind of funny and compare me to my
stand-up over in the corner, and say, that's you.
And that's important.
I think you're not going to win the battle of winning over
urban America overnight.
It's going to take a long time.
And we believe that the youth initiative that we are
certainly very supportive of and trying to drive is an
important part of that.
We think Ricky being in NASCAR helps to bring more attention
to our sport.
So we are all in this together.
Our goal is to grow our teams individually, but we can use
each other to accomplish that.
And NASCAR is certainly a great supporter and partner of
ours because they want to see the same
things happen as well.
So innovation, youth, and extreme sports, different
sports like Ricky is involved in, all those things can help
us make connections to people that you might not think as
typical NASCAR fans.
And what I love--
I twittered this the other day.
I got a haircut in Vegas, and the dude that cut my hair
could barely speak English.
But he said, you Daytona 500 man.
And if you can speak English, I usually get, you haven't won
many races.
So kind of find a connection with that world.
I might try to move into it.
But honestly, I'll tell you a quick story.
When I was a kid growing up in Kentucky, I used to get in the
car with my mom and dad, and we would drive one hour from
Owensboro, Kentucky, to be able to sit on the side of the
road and listen to the NASCAR races.
That was 1975.
It wasn't on TV. Obviously the internet, Al Gore hadn't
invented that yet.
So there was very little way to get information about the
sport that I love so much.
And so when I was 12, I had a brother racing, and that's why
we took the time to do that, and that's why it became a
passion of mine.
That's how young our sport is.
Nowadays, kids in the city or all over the world can click
on nascar.com and learn about our sport.
They can turn on Speed in the morning and watch racing
coverage all day long.
I barely graduated from high school without that
distraction.
I couldn't imagine what it must be like for kids today,
because we can watch NASCAR from daylight to dark.
So Toyota coming to the sport back in '07, that helped to
diversify what we were doing.
More people wanted to see what was going to go on in our
sport because of Toyota being there.
So if I'm a marketer or an advertiser, and I'm looking
for an innovative way to reach people that I haven't reached
before, when 6 million people are going to tune in this
Sunday and watch us race cars from Kansas, that's a great
place to start.
Be a part of that.
Get on a car.
Buy an ad.
But use our sport, because my point is,
we're still very young.
And we're the second largest sport in America, but we have
so much potential for growth, and we've got so many more
places that we can connect to that we haven't
even touched yet.
And that's what I challenge the folks at Michael Waltrip
Racing to do every day, is just try to figure out a way
to be different so that we can reach more
and different people.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: And to elaborate on what he talked
about, what Michael talked about earlier with Domino's
and Best Western, I was in Canada about two months ago at
a sponsor function, and I got my room key, and there was
Domino's Pizza.
So it's not just here United States-wide, it's all over.
I know for me in Europe, my fan base is very big.
So that's always great for sponsors.
One thing cool about NASCAR that I think is one of their
strong points of many for sponsors is we are very
accessible.
You can't go to a basketball game and meet somebody like
Michael, or Jimmie Johnson, or someone like that.
It ain't going to happen.
Where in NASCAR, you can walk through the garage.
Kings and legends of the sport's cars are right there.
It just isn't going to happen.
And they can see your logo there, and you can perhaps get
an autograph if the day is going good and
everything is well.
I think that's all added value.
It really is.
I think that's one cool thing.
If I was sponsoring a car, you can get up there, and you feel
like you're a part of it.
So just a great added bonus about it.
MIKE JOY: And I think that extends to the fan
experience at home.
If--
pick a pitcher--
he serves up a gopher ball, and your hero knocks it out of
the park, you don't get to hear from either of them until
you watch it on the sports very late at night or read the
paper the next morning.
But if Michael wins, or Ricky wins, or if somebody turns him
over, one of our people is going to be right there with a
microphone to bring that experience home to the fan.
And you don't get that in any other sport.
JOHN AMAN: No.
I think what's happening also is the partners in the sport
are working hard behind Michael and all the other
owners and drivers.
But ESPN is working hard.
Fox is working very hard.
Turner is working *** all their properties to try to
bring this sport into the places where
it hasn't been before.
The social media pieces are important.
Nationwide looks at it from a sponsorship standpoint with
what Michael was just talking about, is that we can bring
people to races, and they can meet drivers.
They can meet owners.
They stand on pit road next to these cars as
they're being fired up.
They can stand on the track while drivers are being
introduced.
They can stand behind the introduction stage and get
autographs less than an hour before they're going to go out
and do their craft.
There isn't another sport where you can get that close
to household names and talk to them and get their autographs.
And we can do that with people that we're trying to do
business with also.
So it's important to us as a sponsor to be able to do that.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: We did the truck race from Vegas Saturday
night, and under caution, we could go right into the guy
leading the race's truck and say, how's it going?
What's your strategy for the end?
And that's part of our job.
People say all the time, how do you focus?
It's what you've done.
It's what you've always done.
You sign autographs, and you smile, and you take pictures,
and eventually, they'll let you in your car, and you can
put up your net and leave all that outside.
But until you get in there and do that, you're the property
of the sport's, not just your individual sponsors, but of
the sport's.
And the sooner you learn that and the sooner you act like
that's fun, even if it isn't, then the better off you'll be.
Some people don't get it, and I'll never understand that.
But it's part of it.
It's like paying toll.
That's your toll, and then you get to do what you love to do.
RICKY CARMICHAEL: Being at the top level of motorcycle
racing, I've never seen a sport work so hard for
pleasing their sponsor and trying to give
them time and TV time.
It's so amazing, and so neat to see, and so rewarding.
Just like you said, when you're interviewing us in car,
they're showing us riding around, and there's your logo.
There's your brand riding around.
I've never seen a sport really try to please their sponsor
like NASCAR does, and I think it goes back to what Michael
was saying earlier.
We're all in this to help each other, and we're
all on the same page.
We know we have to please everybody.
Most of us go above and beyond the call of duty to do that,
because we take pride in what we do, and we know how
important it is.
And I've never seen a sport try to help the sponsors as
much as NASCAR.
So it's pretty neat to see.
JOHN AMAN: And one of the interesting challenges I think
NASCAR faces when it's on air, if you're watching a team
sport, you know exactly where the action has to be, whether
you're lining up at the line of scrimmage, or the pitch is
being made, or whoever's got the ball in their hand on the
basketball court, whatever.
In NASCAR, you need to figure out how to give credit to the
sponsor of every car that's on the track, whether they're
leading, fighting for the lead, or they're sitting in
25th spot at that point in time.
That's something that we find that everybody engaged in the
sport is trying to do is make sure that people that aren't
leading a race or leading races regularly are still
getting on air time.
Because that's important to the health of this sport, that
we keep getting sponsors into it, and that they want to stay
because they get on air visibility.
MIKE JOY: So let me leave you with this before--
we will open it up for questions about NASCAR, about
the ownership experience, the sponsorship, the driving, or
even the television side of it.
We'll be happy to take your questions.
You can go to the stadium, the arena.
You can go to the Garden.
You can buy local.
You can go to a NASCAR event, you can buy the ball, and
there's 43 of them out there at once.
You can buy the ball, and the athlete that goes along with
it, and the total experience for your key customers, for
your business-to-business relationships, and for the
sport's millions of fans.
There's just not another experience in sport like it.
And we have a couple of folks with microphones if any of you
have questions.
Lewis?
Lewis Franck has been covering this sport for decades.
AUDIENCE: For Michael, everyone will agree that we're
in a time that you can't do business as
usual and attract sponsors.
By example, you pointed out using Twitter
to reach more people.
Big teams, the biggest team like Hendricks with a
four-time champion like Jeff Gordon, doesn't have full
sponsorship for him next year.
Where will the money be coming from in the future?
And does NASCAR need to change something to attract more
viewership and attendance?
MICHAEL WALTRIP: I think we're all challenged with
change right now.
Obviously, when times get tough, you're challenged to
figure out how to make your business model work.
I believe that as we go forward, we have to trim money
off our budget just like any other company does if we want
to survive.
There's just less dollars out there.
But I also believe in our sport, and I love to hear John
say that their TV ratings are improving.
I think more people are watching Nationwide races.
The cup races take a lot of abuse from the media at times
about TV ratings or crowds, but there's nowhere in all of
the world gathered on a Sunday afternoon, nowhere is there
more people gathered than there are at NASCAR races.
So the magnitude of these events are huge, and we just
need to continue to race our cars hard and fight through
this tough time that all of us are experiencing.
And understand that if you're a crew guy, and you work on a
car, and that's what your passion is, and that's what
you love to do, you're lucky to get to do it.
If you're a driver, it's the same thing.
Maybe we have to--
well, not maybe.
We have to focus on trying to cut dollars out of our teams
so we can still go race them.
And the fans are having to make choices like that as well
with their entertainment dollars, and
that's just a part.
A lot of times people are looking at us and saying,
what's wrong with the sport?
Well, there's nothing wrong with the sport.
It's just that times are difficult right now for so
many people, and we've always had this
amazing slope of growth.
TV ratings, sponsorship, attendance, everything was
going in an amazing direction.
And we've hit a little lull now, and we're taking a lot of
abuse for it.
And I just don't see it.
I don't get it.
I look in the grandstands, and it just makes me proud to be a
part of this.
I look around and think, wow, these people got up this
morning, drove through traffic, bought a ticket just
to see cars go around.
I feel like I've got a connection with those folks,
because that's exactly what I would have done as well.
JOHN AMAN: Maybe they don't see what Nationwide is seeing
right now, which is, as we've written business in this
sport, we're writing a customer that is a higher
value to us than most of the rest of the customers we're
writing right now.
They're a better driving record.
They own more cars.
They insure their house with us when they also
insure their car.
They usually have something else in the house
they insure as well.
So when we look at the 75 million NASCAR fans and 55
million or so that are adults that are then engaging with
us, they're a better customer than the
general population is.
And that is actually a surprise to many of the
executives we had to sell this into at Nationwide, too.
So I think from a sponsorship story out there, there's
something to sell in NASCAR if we can
tell the story correctly.
MIKE JOY: Do we have any other questions?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
MIKE JOY: Yes, sir?
AUDIENCE: Turn that on.
Following on the Nationwide point, I think it's very
interesting you mentioned awareness and consideration.
Obviously, when you sell to your executives,
what are the metrics?
Because over a period of time, you have to show specific
growth of business.
Because it doesn't matter whether you're Toyota or
Nationwide or Tums. In today's world, if you don't move the
needle, you're not going to renew.
JOHN AMAN: Right, so the metric says--
there are a number of different pieces.
We look at it, one, at the high level of the funnel, are
we moving on any awareness and consideration?
It always has a lot to do with the modeling that we have that
falls through to see what our return on investment would be.
Indicators that that modeling is correct are things like
when people originate into our quote and buying a new quote
and writing system from NASCAR sites, they buy our policies
at twice the rate of starting in any other place.
So if they come in from nascar.com and say, I want to
get a quote from Nationwide, or the ESPN section of racing
and say, I want to get a quote from Nationwide, they're twice
as likely to complete the quoting process and then twice
as likely to buy the policy than they are if they started
at one of our other search engine efforts.
So that validates the rest of our modeling for us.
Our agents provide us feedback on what happens.
We look at what happens in our show car program and what
turns into leads, what happens to the leads we
get on site as well.
So we have a lot of metrics that some of them are
indicators, like an oil gauge on a car is, and some of them
are actually telling us how fast we're going like the--
well, you guys use RPMs instead of speedometers, but
like the major gauges on the car.
MIKE JOY: OK, I think we have time for--
if there's one more.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: All this information will be out in a
hardcover book in January.
MIKE JOY: Do you have a title yet?
MICHAEL WALTRIP: I think it's going to be In
the Blink of an Eye.
MIKE JOY: In the Blink of an Eye.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: It's by Hyperion, and it's about the
tenth anniversary--
it's basically about the tenth anniversary of the Daytona 500
that I won and Dale Earnhardt got killed in, and then some
more stuff.
MIKE JOY: Sir?
AUDIENCE: NASCAR fans and other fans are used to seeing
logos all over the uniforms and on the cars, and now we're
starting to see a little bit that Major League Soccer is
doing that.
The WNBA is putting jersey-front sponsors.
Are we going to see more?
NASCAR has obviously led the way in that.
Will we see that spreading to more sports and the sort of
NASCARizing of uniforms and jerseys?
MIKE JOY: Well sure, because all sports right now are
looking for revenue in this new economy.
And in Europe, it's been quite common on
soccer teams to be sponsored.
But I believe what you're seeing are team sponsorships
on these logos and not individual sponsorships such
as the NASCAR drivers have with their athletes.
They share it with golf and tennis, but to
a much lesser extent.
In fact, I believe those sports regulate the number and
placement of sponsor logos, and they're
quite strict on it.
The genie is not out of the bottle like it is here in
NASCAR, where you have pretty much free rein.
JOHN AMAN: Yeah, I think what you are seeing is the
individual sport model, golf, racing, tennis, what have you,
is moving into the team sport.
Because as Mike said, we're, as sponsors, demanding more
visibility, and the leagues are looking for more revenue.
MICHAEL WALTRIP: And I love the fact that we're getting
credit for that NASCARizing of some teams in the world.
Because we get it.
We need it.
And those guys are beginning to have that, like Mike said,
because of the new economy.
Those people are beginning to have to look at every dollar
that they can turn as well.
So the whole world's changing, and I think that's good for
the fans for sure, because they're going to get more
value for what they spend at the races.
MIKE JOY: I'll point out a couple faces in the crowd as
we break up.
There are folks in the front row from NASCAR and from
Michael Waltrip Racing who would love to speak with you.
Fox Sports Sales just also happens to be represented up
here with Fox Sports covering the first part
of the NASCAR season.
There are several folks, including Joe Mattioli here in
the front row, whose family owns Pocono Raceway, who has a
son that's a young driver looking for
sponsorship as well.
So we'll hang around a bit if any of you
have further questions.
Michael, John, Ricky, thank you so much for coming to New
York today and sharing your wisdom and experience.
And thanks to all of you for joining us this morning.
[APPLAUSE]