With the 2016 NASCAR season in the bag, a primary high point for NASCAR continues to be its digital strategy with the surge of NASCAR Digital in recent years propelling the sport as a driver of digital engagement innovation and opportunity. 2016 saw the organization notch 256 million social engagements across all its digital platforms, marking an uptick of 87% year-over-year with a massive spike in video content views and 14% growth in followers. Since taking control of its digital strategy in 2012, the division continues to spread its wings, taking on the platforms for race teams and speedways and now, sponsorship as well.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Colin Smith, VP of NASCAR Digital Media, about the growth, its content strategy and Monster’s new deal.
Smith on history: If you take a step back and look at where we were when we got our rights back in 2012, 2013 turned out to be a crazy year for us, having to build the platform and do everything for ourselves for the first time. It was about trying to become independent and trying to launch a stable platform, but it took us almost an entire season to do that. So heading into 2014, the goal was to stabilize the experience, and sometimes you have to sacrifice the user experience to make that happen unfortunately. Now that we had insights to look back on, we were able to make those changes. 2015 became about finally taking that knowledge and experience and finally do what we thought we would be able to do in 2013, minus all of the operational challenges. That was a big success, so heading into 2016, it became about what we wanted to do from a revenue perspective and decide if we wanted a partner on this or not. We ended up deciding to do all of this ourselves, from a revenue perspective, including taking back the Turner deal for ad sales.
On current goals: How do we start to integrate our a little bit more with the industry? Can we create a digital services media group that supports the industry? The model makes a lot more sense if we have everybody together and if we can start aggregating the NASCAR experience into one holistic opportunity for brands, that’s just going to be a better pitch. So we started aggressively pitching that idea to teams and saw some traction, including rebuilding the Iowa Speedway platform and the Richard Childress Racing site this month and we have two other teams that are going to follow. The hope is that in two years we have all 18 teams on one centralized platform.
On content: I think our mantra is to always start with competition-based story-telling and break it out from there. That drives most of our strategy. I think where we are seeing change the most is the integration of social and all of the opportunities present. Up until recently, Facebook Live wasn’t even a thing, and now it is a big player. Of course, most of our content is driven by the race weekends, that’s where most of the drama, action and conflict take place and, for us, the challenge is how we drive that conversation Monday through Thursday. What’s been successful is to leverage social platforms to accomplish that because fans won’t necessarily come to NASCAR O&O platforms on a Wednesday but they will be on social platforms.
On room for improvement: We have to do a better job, as a league and as an industry, of telling all of our drivers’ stories. For example, William Byron, who was almost the trucks champion this year, got into the sport through iRacing. He was playing in his living room when he got his chance and did really well. That is an unbelievable story. There are so many different stories like that and we have to make sure to curate those stories and push them out there because they are compelling and connect audiences with the drivers.
On Monster Energy’s new deal: We are eager to start working directly with Monster Energy’s marketing and content teams. They have a proven way of identifying and creating unique content, and are pros at pushing that content across their massive social following. I think we will be able to learn a lot from each other, and I believe we’ll be able to build some things in the digital space together that haven’t yet been seen in the sport.
