Wally Parks established the National Hot Rod Ass’n in 1951, a decade before anyone had ventured into outer space.
American soldiers were immersed in the Korean War. Garage-door openers — and homes with garages, for that matter — were new. Color TVs were barely on the horizon. Cordless telephones (never mind wafer-thin cellphones with built-in cameras) hadn’t emerged.
The Digital Revolution was brewing, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the internet exploded onto the scene. And Parks probably couldn’t have fathomed today’s customized, multi-platform digital smorgasbord.
But the 70-year-old NHRA is embracing it with the gusto of a millennial. “Zoom” no longer is just what race cars do. It’s one of the key tools in the sport’s communications toolbox.
After all, NHRA officials and Camping World CEO Marcus Lemonis both used Twitter to reach a series-sponsorship deal. Business models and best practices are morphing.
Even so, the exchange of tweets last year between the two parties after Coca-Cola ditched its agreement with the sanctioning body was intriguing. For Lemonis, it was a strategic move: “It’s like having the world’s greatest focus group” — without paying a marketing-research agency.
“I’ll tell you why I did it that way,” Lemonis said. “I think it’s really important when you’re going to act on behalf of a company and do something with the fans that if they feel involved from the beginning and they feel like they’re a part of the process, you’re going to learn more than you would if you did it in a vacuum. If you did it in a boardroom, an ad agency, you wouldn’t get the fan interaction. You wouldn’t get the feedback of whether it was a good idea or a bad idea.”
Lemonis wanted to keep the negotiations public and wouldn’t allow a private phone conversation.
“I wasn’t going to let ’em do it. I wanted to see pressure on them. They were very public about what happened with Coke and I really wanted to understand why, because there’s usually reasons a sponsor leaves,” Lemonis continued. “They’re unhappy with something. They’re not feeling like they’re getting a return. There’s always more to the story. I thought I would ferret it all out in public, that maybe people both pro and con to NHRA would surface. And there was a number of people who reached out to me and said, ‘This is a bad idea’ or ‘This is a good idea.’ And I really appreciated the feedback.”
With evolving consumer behaviors and constantly upgraded technology providing new platforms, the NHRA itself is transforming into more than just a regulatory body. It’s learning how to identify and serve its current customers and court new audiences on a global scale through fresh media outlets and apps.
And it can pivot and adapt according to such information, marketing, and data measuring firms as Nielsen and Scarborough and the sponsorship-valuation platform Hookit. The latter is designed, according to its website, “to quantify and track the value and performance of sports sponsorships in social and digital media.”
Mike Rau, NHRA senior manager of marketing and research, said, “One of the major transitions that we’ve done was in 2016, by taking our production in-house … where we were in charge of making sure that we were telling all the stories that needed to be told and not dealing with an outside production company. With FOX, that dramatically increased our overall viewership on our broadcast and was able to shed more light on all the great stories that have taken place with the NHRA over this rich 70-year history.
“And one of the benefits of us then producing that show and owning all the content was that we had all of that to share on our social platforms,” he added. “We built an entirely new website back then to better incorporate video into the site and to give fans more than the option of just either going to the race or watching it on TV. They’re able to interact with it on their phone, as well.
“We’ve seen dramatic growth since 2016, especially on our social platforms, in addition to what we’ve seen on TV,” Rau continued. “I took this position at the end of 2015. At the time, we were just about a million on Facebook. We were out like 90-something-thousand on Instagram, and around 105,000 on Twitter. And now our, our Twitter is over 640,000 followers. Our Instagram’s approaching 500,000 followers. In Facebook, we’re over 1.5 million followers, almost 1.6 million. So it’s really helped us bolster the online landscape, us owning the content and sharing with people the magic that is NHRA championship drag racing.”
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