The new NASCAR season continues to rev up heading into Sunday’s Daytona 500 (on FOX at 2p) on a new season marked not only by a new points format, among other changes, but by the headline-grabbing addition of Monster Energy as an entitlement sponsor as well. Now known as the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, the addition of the brand also brings in an infusion of its target demographic in 18-34 year-olds which corporate executives hope to leverage to continue growing a pipeline to younger fans and marks the third company in NASCAR history to serve as the entitlement sponsor in NASCAR premier series history, following RJ Reynolds and Sprint/Nextel.
Monster Energy’s deal also marks the company’s latest strategic foray in sports, which include the Monster Energy Supercross events, esports, UFC, and PBR, among others. The company’s growing portfolio of partners and its activations has also earned the company the award for Cynopsis Sports’ 2017 Brand of the Year, which they will be receiving at the annual Cynopsis Sports Media Awards on April 12 in NYC.
Mitch Covington, VP of Sports Marketing for Monster Beverage Corp., spoke with Cynopsis about the brand’s approach to sports and its success in engaging consumers.
Covington on Monster Energy’s approach to sports: One thing that we always look at is how much emotion we see in the sport. When we looked at whether or not we wanted to go in with NASCAR, we had to consider if it brought about emotion from the fans, the teams, and the participants. When you look at NASCAR, you can see how it brings out a lot of emotion. If you look at UFC, it is obviously that same level of engagement as are our other sports such as bull riding and that is the level of energy and passion that we want to be a part of.
On connecting emotion to the brand: We want to be as authentic as possible in the sport, we don’t just want to buy a flag to hang on the track on in the arena. We don’t want to just to the traditional things. We don’t ever want to go all in on a sport to begin with. We start out by sponsoring an athlete or a group of athletes that not only fit our brand, but win. We believe that what wins on Sunday, sells on Monday. So if that works out well, then we look at becoming more involved with the sport like we did with NASCAR or Supercross. We start out by leveraging a single relationship so we can understand the audiences before we go all out.
On the opportunity with NASCAR: There are three buckets here that really appealed to us. The first, most obvious one, is the massive TV audience that allows us to expose our brand and relate our brand to what I think is the pinnacle of racing in America. The second part is our exposure at the event and the millions who come to the event, and being able to show off our brand that way both with the cars as well as through the entitlement sponsorship. The third is to be able to use the property with both our retail partners and with our customers to be able to give them some experiences that are really hard to get.
On social activation: We are going to bring some social media content to an audience that really hadn’t been exposed to it before through our channels. We’ve got a huge social and media following of our own and we want to create some behind-the-scenes content that you may not have seen before. Dirtshark, for example, is a YouTube video series that we created at Monster mostly focused on our existing programs. We want to do something similar for NASCAR where we are going to expose a lot of behind-the-scenes of what goes on during a NASCAR weekend and hopefully bring it to our Monster channel.
