[Team Yates]

Firing, hiring of drivers has wide-ranging effects

One marketing exec says that's the nature of NASCAR's business

By Marty Smith, NASCAR.COM
August 17, 2006
10:42 AM EDT (14:42 GMT)

Ray Evernham grabbed the stick, wound up and whack! The Jeremy Mayfield piñata was destroyed. Forever. At NASCAR's highest level, the business of hiring and firing drivers has wider-reaching ramifications than those experienced in Corporate America's typical setting. There's much more involved than just boxing up the Nerf Hoop and the fountain pens and the Olan Mills family portrait from the church directory. See, most of us are merely minute parts in the global machine. Our collective mundane tasks earn us a living and make The Man rich. We get fired? Big deal. Forty other people are lined up with a smile to work 50 and get paid for 40. NASCAR drivers, well, they're different. They're entertainers. We section off a portion of our 40-grand-a-year so that they might marvel us, so that we might live that speed and sound and fury vicariously through them. Like most entertainers, they are celebrities. They smile back at us as we grab a case of Budweiser at the Hop-In. They smile back at us as we open the Swiss Cake Rolls. And the beans 'n weenies. And the Corn Chex. We see them on television. A lot. They peddle everything from liquor to life insurance. And that, folks, is the point of this column. NASCAR drivers represent multiple companies. So when a driver is fired or leaves voluntarily for another team, tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars spent promoting them are forfeited. Think about all those Elliott Sadler M&Ms cardboard stand-ups and print advertisements and Internet banner advertisements. They're now obsolete. That's one reason UPS opted to move to Michael Waltrip Racing with Dale Jarrett -- they've built considerable equity in D.J. and the Big Brown Truck. And the primary sponsors aren't the only ones involved. Sadler Coca-Cola Racing Family cardboard stand-ups? Obsolete. Same goes for anything Ford-related that pertains to Sadler, and any pending marketing initiatives related to special paint schemes or programs, according to Robert Yates Racing sources.

And that leads us back to Mayfield. Many of you have seen the aforementioned Mayfield piñata commercial, as well as its sister spot in which Mayfield summons his transporter driver to stay in the throttle and crush Tony Stewart's Chevrolet. Classic, right? Absolutely hilarious.
Yeah, well you won't be seeing those any longer. Mayfield's release forces Sprint Nextel to pull the ads. Why? Race fans don't want outdated advertisements. They had to go. "It's inherent with the business, so it's not something that we don't anticipate," said Dean Kessel, director of Nextel Cup Series marketing, of the possibility that a driver change could ruin a marketing campaign. "That's just part of the business. "With these things you certainly want to be relevant and you want to be topical. So to pull [the commercial] off is absolutely the right thing to do, because the fans know that the sport has changed with these driver moves and we need to be relevant to the fan, which is one of our main goals."
Kessel said Sprint Nextel's spots are shot prior to the start of the season, when drivers' schedules are more accommodating. But that may change.
"We may look, down the road, to produce our allotment, half at the beginning of the year and half midway through the year," he said. "That may be [a lesson] we take away from this." Kessel chose not to specify dollar figures required to produce Sprint Nextel commercials, but did say the company has an array of backups from which to choose that will replace the Stewart/Mayfield spots for the remainder of the season.
Mayfield and Stewart were chosen, Kessel said, based on being two-time Chase qualifiers, and in Stewart's case being the defending series champion. "It's certainly not optimum [to pull the ads] -- we've gotten a lot of value out of those two spots," Kessel said. What, exactly, does 'value' mean in this instance?"The value is that it's relevant to the sport, the fan can relate to it and it helps move our business and our property," Kessel explained. In other words, fans enjoy it. And because of it are apt to buy phones. "We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from our fans on it -- that's a metric you look at, based on focus groups and things like that that give you the type of feedback you're looking for to measure success of a spot," he said. "It's all been positive." But now it's gone, the byproduct of a volatile business arena, one in which the potential overall return, Kessel says, far outweighs the potential risk of a situation such as this. "This sport is unlike any other sport," Kessel said. "Take the NFL, for example. It's not like it was in the '70s and '80s where teams stuck together. Free agency changed that whole model. But fans are still fans of the team. "This sport is a little bit different because you're a fan of a driver, and the equity the sponsor has in a driver has a tremendous amount of value because you can't get that in a regular team sport.
"So I guess it can be a double-edged sword, but the sponsors that I know that play in the Nextel Cup Series are aware of that going in, and are willing to take those risks."

[Quality88]

*&$#%^@! Corporate sponsorship. To hell with'em.

[thunderfoot]

Originally Posted by Quality88

*&$#%^@! Corporate sponsorship. To hell with'em.

If I only had those dollars I would probably play nicer. Yeah, right. Come to my corner of the sandbox and y'all would probably run off setting a new track record. At least I'm consistant. That counts for something in our sport. Yee-Haw.

[PenelopePitStop]

Interesting, but that article is from August of 2006. I guess we could consider the entire 2007 season as Silly Season.

Corporate Sponsorship/Marketing is just that, Corporate, and is no different from any other cut-throat Corporation selling a product or service. Just so happens in this case, it's racing.

Sad to say, you can't get around it.