Watch or listen to episode 326 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Ben Valenta, EVP of Strategy and Analytics at Fox Sports and co-author of Fans Have More Friends.
Ben discusses how he came to see fandom as a “belonging engine,” and why the real definition of a fan is “passion plus action” (which his team measures through what they call a value score). He breaks down why it’s far easier to grow the fans you already have than to convert non-fans (the 0-to-1 problem), why fandom is horizontal rather than vertical so your next fan is already a fan of something else, and how youth fandom actually takes root through repetition and family bonding rituals. He also gets into the most underrated metrics in sports media, the wellness research at the heart of the book (the bigger the fan, the happier and more connected), the difference between strong-tie and weak-tie fandom online, and the Greg Armstrong story that reframes what a season ticket is really for.
The term “partnership” gets thrown around a lot. Its cousin, “collaboration” (or “collab”), is used just as liberally.
But most partnerships are sponsorships or advertisements with a fancier name. As traditional media has evolved away from the interruptive, you-have-to-sit-through-this-because-it-pays-for-the-content model of years past, content producers and publishers, increasingly “creators,” have taken the reins and helped force a new model. One where the product they’re promoting is worth talking about and showcasing because it’s part of the content itself.
Creators have had no choice. While premium media production companies and influencers are still surviving, if not flourishing, through the more typical corporate shilling, creators are largely earning their audience with every post and every piece of content. All of which makes sports and creators such a natural marriage. Sports are entertainment and community builders, and most creators are chasing those same things.
Major sports leagues already boast millions of fans, but they’re always chasing the next one. Modern sports marketing is less about turning every consumer into an X’s-and-O’s geek fixated on tactics and transactions, and more about opening new entry points into fandom. It was in this evolving age of sports marketing that Neil Tennant came up. Tennant, who today runs 540 Agency the creator management and marketing firm he founded, was right in the thick of it when he started nearly a decade ago on the social media team at the National Hockey League (NHL).
“There’s always a core basis of serving the hardcore hockey fan,” said Tennant, who began his career with the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL (a minor-league hockey circuit whose teams are affiliated with NHL clubs). “At the NHL, [your channels] need to be a place where you can find the highlight; you’ll always service and be there for the die-hard fan.
“However, as we know, the goal of marketing — the goal of social — is to reach new audiences, and it’s an amazing platform to do so. For me, it was always: how can I tie in other pieces of pop culture, sports, and entertainment to widen the aperture and relate to new fans?”
The need to think beyond the games and highlights only intensified when the world, let alone the sports world, largely shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic. While the games stopped, the leagues’ efforts to develop, reach, and engage fans, new and old, continued. In many ways, it was a golden age of entertainment consumption; people were stuck inside, looking for pastimes and community. Sports leagues and teams still had massive platforms but a dearth of content. Meanwhile, the rise of short-form feeds on TikTok and Instagram Reels was ushering in a new, democratized form of entertainment, one where a user with no followers could amass millions of views if the content earned it.
This confluence of events and trends first manifested at the NHL, where Tennant played a key role in embracing user-generated content (UGC). The NHL solicited, showcased, and even monetized (through sponsorship) a diverse selection of UGC, from outdoor rinks to trick shots and much more in between. As this strategy progressed, so did Tennant’s understanding of the bigger opportunity that lay ahead.
“The most common refrain I hear in the creator economy is ‘I was stuck in my parents’ home in 2020, started making videos, now I have a million followers, and I’m a full-time creator,'” said Tennant. “As we were publishing more UGC, we noticed a lot of talented young men and women across social publishing hockey content. We’d share it, they’d keep maturing on their side, until it made sense for us to formally add them on a capital-C Creator basis — stop sharing their content as UGC and start partnering with them more formally.”
Thus germinated a true capital-S Strategy around creators for the NHL. There was no guidebook, no best practices — it was all so new. As Tennant became more engrossed and gained experience and expertise through, well, doing it: working with creators, learning about them, and analyzing the ecosystem, he developed a deeper understanding of the space and how to think about it from a sports-league perspective.
This wasn’t about simply finding influencers with massive audiences; that would be only a half-step removed from paying Meta itself to buy reach. Tennant described the creator identification and activation framework he devised, which guides how he builds a creator wish list and Rolodex.
“I always visualized it as concentric circles,” said Tennant, who, in addition to managing creators at 540 Agency, consults for brands and businesses across sports, entertainment, and beyond. “At the heart, we had hockey creators. On the experiential side, if there was open ice, I was going to have a hockey creator there who understood how to skate, how to shoot, and how to interact with, let’s say, the ice inside of Fenway Park. So we always had a nucleus of hockey creators at all the events, and always in the mix. I think it’s important to always serve the creator community in that capacity…
“The second circle I always thought about, I called them unicorns,” explained Tennant. “These were folks who were interested in hockey but not outwardly publishing or projecting their fandom. These folks are really hard to find — it might be one IG Story where half the image is an [Edmonton] Oilers jersey, and you just see it and keep it mentally. Then the next time the Oilers are in the Finals, I call them up like, ‘Yo, we’ve got to get you to the game.’
“Keeping a CRM, a Rolodex of those folks, made for the most beautiful, most successful partnerships in my mind, because it’s someone who exists outside of your traditional community — so you’re bringing in a new audience, but it’s also authentic; they also understand what’s going on. I’ve hosted the third category, capital-I influencers, on the glass of the Stanley Cup Final, and they’re texting the whole time. I’d often avoid that scenario. You really want someone who’s engaged and makes sense to both audiences.”
As the strategy matured across the development, marketing, and events sides of creator work, the business operations and opportunities became increasingly integrated, too. And at the bottom line of all this, ticketing, merch, and concessions aside, it’s ultimately brands footing most of the bill. That intersection, where brands could reach the audiences of both sports and creators at once, represented a new kind of opportunity to capture.
Tennant described the dynamic, and the value prop, of commingling those audiences for prospective brand sponsors.
“You almost have a triangle effect between yourself, the third-party brand, and the creator, and how those dots get connected can be very different — very successful or very complex, depending on how you approach it,” he explained. “Sometimes a brand would come and say, ‘Hey, we want to do this, can you help consult? Can you do creator discovery, creator recommendations? We want to do it ourselves, but we understand you have relationships and expertise.’
“Other times, it was me wanting to host and produce an entire experiential activation and saying, ‘Hey, this is an incredible value-add — not only do you get new space within a tentpole event, you also gain access to amazing creators. Can you come on board as the title presenting sponsor and help us bring a concept to life?'”
The creator economy is an economy, and with the integration of creators into business strategy comes the need to justify the time, effort, resources, and budget poured into creator collaborations and content. As you’ll recall, there is no conventional, textbook approach to understanding the full value proposition of a creator campaign, activation, or strategy. The value-add for sponsors from the previous section is the easier one to grasp, but the true return is greater — even if it’s harder to measure.
If these were just traditional commercials, interrupting and borrowing audiences and attention, then it’d be easier to compute ROI. But creator activations are more complex, more engaging, and so require a different, more thoughtful equation. Tennant concedes he doesn’t have all the answers, but he’s spent years in the space and at least has well-informed ideas for a framework that longtime marketers and agencies can understand.
“Not enough time is spent — particularly from a creative marketing agency standpoint — on both the upfront and the postmortem content performance,” said Tennant. “The upfront is pricing and negotiation, a subtopic I could talk forever about. On the post-activation side, I was always trying to come up with a ‘return on creator spend’ number that would put creator performance adjacent to paid media.
“Paid media is a language most marketers can converse in — CPMs and so on. Could we look at creator engagement, views, impressions, cut it by how much it cost in creator spend, and determine some multiplier to see who performed well against the cost?”
Both the costs and the returns can be a bit opaque with creator activations, but that complexity is a feature, not a bug. Because it’s not just sponsor activation, or marketing, or fan development, or experiential, or content — it’s all of those things at once, and often more. That’s why leading creator strategy in sports organizations has developed into such a robust, specialized discipline, often assisted by agencies or consultants to ensure the right creator is selected for the right objectives, and the collaboration is maximized for the best, multi-faceted return possible. Even with the evolution of the creator economy and the influx of new, often AI-infused solutions, creator strategy leadership still requires a human touch: somebody who can step back, set aside their personal biases, and bring to life a partnership that’ll pay off.
“You have to have some taste, a bar, and criteria,” said Tennant, who identifies creators both for 540 Agency to manage and for its consulting clients to work with. “Then, just like any good campaign [leader] or marketer, there are times where a creator won’t be your flavor — say you like heavy metal, and they’re a hip-hop artist; those scenarios happen.
“But the best creator marketers understand who’s a valuable partner and how successful a crossover could be.”
We’re still in the early days of creator marketing, not just in sports, but everywhere. It’s the emergence of a brand-new channel to reach, engage, and develop fans, to activate partnerships, and to pursue short- and long-term objectives. Its ascent has been more sudden than the arrival of digital and social channels. And the many forms creator strategies can take, across a vast spectrum of creators and their respective audiences, skills, and content, add a layer of both complexity and opportunity.
It can be overwhelming to keep up with the breakneck pace of change in the creator space, but the best path forward is to sprint toward the uncertainty, experiment and innovate, and develop frameworks through practice. Creators will help usher in new fans through more diverse entry points, changing the nature of what it means to be a sports fan. The best sports marketing and fan development channel may be right there in the feed, just a few seconds of scrolling away.
On episode 325 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Neil Tennant, Founder of 540 Agency, a creator talent management agency.
Watch or listen to episode 325 of the Digital and Social Media Sports podcast, in which Neil chatted with Neil Tennant, Founder of 540 Agency, a creator talent management agency.
Tennant discusses building the NHL’s creator marketing program from the ground up, the two pillars of a creator strategy (experiential activations and commissioned content), using “concentric circles” to build a creator wish list, how the league’s fan UGC program seeded it all, measuring “return on creator spend” and bringing data to a vibes-driven space, the first-of-its-kind 3-on-3 creator tournament he dreamed up around the 4 Nations Face-Off, why long-term relationships and creator equity are the next frontier, how he discovers and signs creators today, what he’s building at 540, and more.
Not just in sports marketing — though that’s the focus here. The cycle is starting to propel itself: take in data, form hypotheses and next actions, produce outcomes, feed the results back in as new data, and go again. Continuous forward motion, driven by data-results-data.
That flywheel sounds too good to be true, but it’s very much possible today. The thing is: it won’t happen on its own (yes, there’s still a need for some human intervention! and some software, sure). The dots have to be connected; data sources wrangled from disparate platforms, some less opaque than others, and the catalysts have to be in place to generate those inputs — to invite fans to reveal, passively or proactively, more about themselves and their preferences. All of it compounding into better outcomes for the team (or league, or college program) and the fan.
This is the challenge WMT Digital is taking on with its partners. The fan engagement and technology platform serves the wider sports and live events ecosystem, with a big footprint in college sports, where it has witnessed and helped usher in the digital transformation. Big data and data-driven insights are not foreign terms to college athletics leaders anymore. But the aha has to lead to action. The flywheel has to spin.
“College is generally in a good spot in terms of the insights they’re deriving from that data,” said Chris Freet , EVP and Chief Strategy Officer of WMT Digital. “Where they’ve been getting stuck for a long time is action. So we need to step in as their provider to help them take action, and in some instances, take the action for them. There’s limited value in insight if you’re not testing that insight to see how it can drive your athletic department or your team forward.
“When we think about data, it’s organizing it and constantly recommending to our partners: here’s the next thing to do, here’s the next data point to get. Neil is in your email database but not in your text database, and he hasn’t downloaded your mobile app — do these things to drive to these outcomes. Action is where it’s been stuck, and that’s where I’m most excited about what’s coming with our partners in the next 12 to 18 months.”
So what does this all mean in practice? The first step is a mindset shift: from the basic, still-useful cohorts of decades past to data-driven fan segments derived from actual behavior. Today’s technology allows for near-endless analysis, forming hypotheses and action steps to test in the real world, then feeding the results back into the machine. It sounds technical, because, well, it kind of is. But it all traces back to real behaviors from real fans responding to real experiences. That’s the model being engineered and implemented at WMT, as President Andy Zeilman laid it out.
“Using the benefit of these smart AI agents — they’re always 24/7 on. They can bring forth new segments that might be arising in the data, even in their infant stage,” said Zeilman, who spent years in various industries, including tech, before finding his way to sports tech at WMT. “That’s learning, that’s education for an athletic director: are we seeing a trend in fan behavior? How do we test this in a real offline environment in a stadium to see if there really is a new segment of fan?…
“But it all comes back to the data,” he continued. “The digital experience and the data are so intimately and inherently connected that the digital experience has to be captured — it has to be actively on the data. It’s that round flywheel loop: data flows in, you get new segmentations, you test those segments through new content, new experiences, new outreaches, new polls — all auto-generated, [with a] human in the loop, because you never want to lose control of your experience or content, at least for now. That’s how you continue to build up and speed up that flywheel. That’s where technology fits in — on the front end, the back end, and throughout the entire flow of experience to data, back to experience.”
Understanding and segmenting a fan base is increasingly complex today, too, because fandom can look a lot different now, in college or pro. It’s all exacerbated by the movement of student-athletes, some taking fan bases with them from school to school, not just college to pro (though that presents well-known opportunities of its own). The data holds the answers, and valuable insight about these emerging fan segments, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. An ACC school isn’t sharing its information with an SEC school. Some pro leagues have more centralized cooperation; the MMRs (multimedia rights holders; i.e. Learfield, Playfly, et al.) have visibility across their properties; and many big-spending national brands may have a better read on dynamic fan affinities than the teams, leagues, and schools themselves.
Accessibility will help. But the bigger point, as Zeilman described it, is recognizing the prevalence of “fluid fandom,” the term now widely adopted across the industry. Understanding fan movement isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity.
“There’s the next-level concept of can you build a clean room across different properties and start looking at trends across properties? Are you seeing fluid fans in college like you’re seeing in pro? In pro, that’s a lot of the rage and concern — fluid fandom,” said Zeilman, who joined WMT Digital in 2024. “When you start getting into gamification, betting, and fantasy, people are becoming fans of the athlete more than fans of the team, and that creates a loyalty issue for those teams, especially with emerging fans growing up with all this.
“How does that impact college? College has been steadfast and true — I’m a fan of this college, my dad was a fan, my granddad was a fan,” Zeilman continued. “Does fluid fandom start bleeding into that market? That’s where you need to start looking at cross-property fandom and cross-property fluidity. We’re not there yet, but this is where the whole industry should be going. As there’s more and more movement to the transfer portal and more athlete affinity or college affinity, where is that line? We’re here to help figure that out and make sure you’re identifying that fluidity early and capturing that revenue within the college partners we have.”
These more serpentine fan journeys require a more thoughtful, forward-thinking approach for schools and teams to stay efficient in their development and revenue strategies. But it’s tough, especially in college, because at a time when every dollar matters more than ever, it’s hard to justify spending time and effort on the younger fan, whose lifetime value may add up to quite a bit but can’t help pay today’s bills nearly as much as the marginal older fan with far more disposable money to spend or donate.
Overcoming that challenge is part of the promise of big data and AI, Freet explained. The burden of understanding all these fan bases, devising the pathways and content to reach, capture, and engage them, building journeys that create lifelong value: AI can do a lot of that heavy lifting, all while continuously learning and improving. That’s why it’s such an exciting time.
“Your most valuable fan is still that 64-year-old that cuts you a big check,” said Freet, who worked at five Division I college athletics programs before making his way to WMT. “On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a 14-year-old that’s probably never opened an email or sent a properly written email before, at least. And for all these athletic departments, with sport being consumed in a million different ways, the bill is coming due.
“What’s exciting about the era we’re in — about AI, about where data can inform the decision-making — is you can have a path for all of these fans. None of them are more important than the other. The 64-year-old is delivering more revenue right now for a lot of reasons. But the ability to normalize your data and deliver a personalized experience that speaks to a bunch of different demographics, and understand where you’re having success and continue to test against that, is very real and not far off in the future.”
We’ve been talking a lot about collecting data and mapping out fan journeys, but there’s a big elephant in the room — the vast majority of fans are unknown. They show up as likes on social media, views on YouTube, traffic numbers on the website. Retargeting them is a legitimate play, to be sure, but the more direct connections, the golden records, the deeper profiles and fan segments, aren’t happening at the top of the funnel, on platforms where the relationship is tenuous at best.
This is the world WMT Digital straddles. The marriage of data and platform building, with content and experiences as the entry points for comprehensive connections and personalized interactions. Fans aren’t going to spend time, let alone register a profile, on owned-and-operated platforms without a good reason. WMT and its partners build those reasons. That’s how you start to spin that deeper data flywheel. Freet talked through the process, using Clemson’s big numbers to frame the latent value sitting there for schools and teams to realize.
“Clemson is one we’ve talked about today: around 8 million unique visitors on an annual basis, a database of season-ticket holders around 8,000, and a ticketing database, last I counted, of about 800,000. That’s a big delta between all those numbers,” he said. “So if every single day when the [athletic director] gets into his office he can go into a dashboard and see how many new fans they added and how many profiles were updated in the last 24 hours — that is very powerful. The motivation for that is a bit in the strengths of the athletic department; that’s where we’ve built a nimble platform. Is it gamification? Is it loyalty? Is it gated content? Yes. Is it signing in to get access, so you don’t have to sign in to all your other accounts every time you want to access something that’s part of your fandom? Yes. Are any of those the magic bullet? No, because that’s the space we live in — we all live in our own channels and have our own preferences.
“But what we’ve built in our ecosystem funnels everything in, from fan ID into fan intelligence, and is bilateral — communicating with those systems both ways, so we understand the actions worked and we can update the profile in the system. All of that is toward those outcomes we talked about: how do we get more identification, make the experience motivating and seamless for the fan, and get them to come back and continue to share with the team they’re already passionate about?”
Zeilman elaborated on the renewed vigor with which the industry is approaching owned-and-operated platforms. The big numbers on social media are seductive, and social will always post the maximum metrics. But once you understand the value of the flywheel and start minding the most meaningful metrics, the picture gets clearer. And besides, the social-versus-O&O dichotomy isn’t an either/or. It’s about making those fan touch points work together.
“That’s the riddle yet to be solved: how do you get that addiction of social media to translate off the platform back to you on an operating ecosystem? It is going to be about next-generation content strategy — interactive experiences, you understanding the fan, so they get that experience in the O&O environment versus the generalized social-media experience,” Zeilman explained. “That partnership with social media is going to have to evolve on a data-bridge-in, data-bridge-out model that hasn’t been fully solved yet, because the methodology has been ’drive to social,’ there’s so much reach on social. How do you revert that now?
“It’s going to take time, but that’s where we’re trying to work with our partners. It’s about the technology, the data, the content, and the strategy of all of it working together to drive engagement, personalization, and identification, all within the system.”
It’s not groundbreaking to state that data is powerful. That’s been the case for generations, going back to the room-sized mainframes of IBM. It’s just that now, with more data than ever, each new data point is more valuable — if it drives action. It’s moving away from “That’s interesting” and more toward “What should happen next.” That’s the promise of all this AI, engineering, platform development, and relationship building with fans.
And, perhaps counterintuitively, it’s making fan engagement, marketing, and business strategy more human. Organizations truly get to know fans as individuals, not as part of some massive, broad-based cohort; fans are treated to personalized experiences based on their real behaviors and stated preferences. It will all keep progressing, too, because data is now forward-looking, dictating what should happen next to produce the best outcome, and prompting action on every key learning captured along the way.
The future is building for fans, not algorithms. Always seeking to deliver fans what they want, and to keep getting better at every interaction. That’s how you build a fan for life. And the lifelong fan is the most valuable of all.
On episode 324 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil chatted with Andy Zeilman, President of WMT Digital, and Chris Freet, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer of WMT Digital.
Watch or listen to episode 324 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil chatted with Andy Zeilman, President of WMT Digital, and Chris Freet, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer of WMT Digital.
Andy and Chris discuss how WMT has built a technology-and-data-first company inside college sports, and why the real bottleneck for athletic departments isn’t a lack of data but the ability to act on it. They break down the move from fan ID to fan intelligence, the push to reclaim fans (along with their data and dollars) from social media and back into an owned-and-operated ecosystem, and how AI is powering a fan data flywheel that surfaces new segments and behaviors. They also get into fluid fandom and what it means for college loyalty, where pro sports can actually learn from the innovators in college, and their own distinct paths into the industry.
Watch or listen to episode 323 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, in which Neil breaks down some of the key themes, insights, and notes from the 2026 Gondola Sports Summit 2026.
WATCH OR LISTEN BELOW! 48 minute duration. Also, find the podcast on Apple, SpotifyandYouTube
Fans don’t root for teams as much as they used to.
For anyone in sports business, this will come as no shock. Don’t get it wrong; there are plenty of avid fans who live for the laundry and shed tears over their teams. But, increasingly, fans, especially younger fans, are fans of individual athletes more than teams. The team is secondary.
While this feels like a relatively new phenomenon for most of the sports world, for NASCAR and the motorsports world as a whole, fandom of individuals over teams has been the norm forever. This is the world Elijah Burke has navigated for years, first with Chip Ganassi Racing, then with Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing, building up RFK into a team that fans came to love, largely because of their content. Fans would always be fans of drivers first and foremost, but Burke understood the importance of building up the team’s platforms. Even if fans weren’t cheering across the board for a given team on weekends at the track, social and content could be the front door for them to like those teams, figuratively and literally, on social media.
“The team brand is still important,” said Burke, who recently joined Dirty Mo Media as its Head of Social Media, following his impressive run at RFK. “It’s important to me because if you can make someone say they’re a fan of the team because of their social media — that is the biggest compliment, to me. You chose to root for our team because you like the admin or you like the content. That’s still important. And I think the brand of the team is still important, but the drivers are mainly who the fans follow for, unless you’re giving something totally different.”
Even if Burke couldn’t get fans to blindly cheer for the RFK team, indifferent to the drivers on its roster, he could make them fans of RFK’s content. And that meant not just going after diehard NASCAR fans; kind of the opposite, instead attracting new and potential fans, who could get exposed to the sport and the team through the feeds. Burke talked about the north star that guided that balanced approach, seeking to engage existing and new fans alike.
“How do I take things that aren’t NASCAR-related and make them NASCAR-related, so people outside the NASCAR bubble may be able to identify or care about it, but also people inside the NASCAR bubble will see that and say, oh, that’s funny, or that’s creative, that’s witty, and that’s associated with the RFK brand,” he explained. “And you kind of have to do it so many times to where the algorithm either feeds people that stuff more because they’re stopping and taking time to look at it, or they just build up a positive connotation with the team.”
Reps from the social platforms and social admins from teams and leagues will note that impressive plays and dramatic moments crush it with engagement and the algorithms. But those highlights largely engage fans, from the avid to the casual. The rise of recommended content, accelerated by the ascent of TikTok five or six years ago now, has allowed sports to break through to new audiences, non-fans or not-yet-fans, in unexpected ways. It’s the oddly fascinating, the novel extraordinary that often goes the most broadly viral. And, for some portion of that audience, it’s an entry point to true fandom of the sport.
Burke told me about their approach, focusing on capturing attention immediately, and one of the videos whose virality is instructive about breakthrough content.
“The hooks where you leave someone needing to watch the rest to understand it; like, we had a video where one of our quality control guys was doing tear-down on one of the cars after the Vegas race a couple years ago, and they found a piece of a wheel off one of the cars — it chipped off the wheel and got stuck in the foam underneath the race car,” Burke said, describing one of RFK’s most viral videos. “And he’s pulling it out, wiggling it out. It was just an iPhone video, and it kind of was like Dr. Pimple Popper for race cars. It’s satisfying in that way. He just pulls it out, and everyone’s like, Oh, that’s from the wheel off Reddick’s car, and he flipped, and it got lodged underneath Chris Buescher’s car.
“He just sends this video, and I’m like, that’s going to do numbers. And it did like 26 million views on Instagram, which is huge for a team that, again, the team doesn’t really have fans — the driver or NASCAR has fans. But for the team to have that was huge.”
Burke has developed an instinct for what works on social. And also an intuition for what will not work. That knowledge can color how a sports team or athlete navigates sponsored content. Sponsored content is part of sports, and NASCAR is no exception; in fact, sponsorship may be more intertwined with NASCAR than any other professional sport. While a lot of sponsorship in NASCAR is driven by logo exposure — just look at any car or driver’s fire suit — that doesn’t mean sponsor integration on social has to suck. But there’s a balance to giving fans what they want and expect alongside delivering the branded messaging the sponsors want. There’s a method and math to the madness, Burke explained.
“You have to use an 80/20 rule,” he said. “Eighty percent is the fun stuff that people actually want to see — like the actual show you’re watching on TV, or in our case, the social stuff in your timeline. The 20% is the stuff you have to do. It’s okay, this sponsor has this objective that may not really excite the fans, but it’s important to the partner…
“One of our partners [was] Trimble. So, how do you find value for [construction software company] Trimble based on their stuff? And you say, these pit stop videos perform really well. It’s not going to tell you what Trimble does, but it has your branding all over it. That could get 8 million views based on what we’ve seen. But this commercial is important for them in telling people what they do, but it’s not going to go viral unless you put paid spend behind it.
“So it’s a balance of, here’s what works for the team, but here’s what helps the partner fulfill their objectives.”
Teams can pretty effectively project the impressions and exposure their sponsors will get each race week. There’s a routine, there’s an expected number of times the car and its logos will get shown on the national broadcasts, but sometimes there’s a crash, figuratively and literally. Social is the variable lever to pull to ensure goals are always reached. A few overperforming posts during the week can leave teams ample leeway. And, sometimes a car and a driver expected to accumulate sponsor impressions over the course of hundreds of laps and hours of TV goes to shit because there’s a crash and the driver’s and car’s day ends early. It was fascinating to hear Burke talk through the formula, in which the metrics targets are never missed.
“Sometimes, the car wrecks out on lap five, and social becomes way more important because there wasn’t much value on TV,” he said. “I would spend every week saying, all right, our race week, the Tuesday before the actual race is when our cadence starts. Here are the paint schemes that are being run this week, and everything through Sunday will focus on those sponsors that race, trying to build up a number of impressions and engagements without just doing it just to inflate it.
“I’d say, alright, we’re going into the race weekend with 750,000 impressions. So I know if, for some reason, we wreck out on lap five, I can still turn in a completed homework assignment in my mind. We still delivered value. Where it’s not like, all right, well, Nielsen [ratings] gave us nothing — social, what do you got? And I’m like, 50,000 impressions. Then it’s, hey, we need to rethink what we’re doing.”
The close integration of sponsors and NASCAR is a feature, not a bug. The emotional attachment fans form to drivers becomes nearly indistinguishable from the brands that it becomes impossible not to associate with the athletes. It’s Jeff Gordon with Pepsi, Kyle Busch and M&M’s, and Tony Stewart and The Home Depot. It’s amplified by drivers routinely thanking their sponsors by name in post-race interviews. Drivers are brand ambassadors for the logos that adorn their gear. That has at times been in conflict with the irascible characters that made the sport unmissable during its heyday and captured generations of fans.
But now, with some exceptions, drivers are (mostly) on their best behavior, wary of upsetting their brand partners or worrying prospective future partners. Burke spoke with me about this evolution; the drivers, well, drive the sport and fans, and they’re the key to fostering even more fans. As long as they’re not too intentionally boring.
“I think you’ve seen a corporatization of a lot of drivers over the years,” said Burke, who grew up a big Tony Stewart fan, and reminisced about the Ride car, the Kodak car, and Home Depot appearances in our interview. “I think we’re getting back to maybe not penalizing for fights and allowing that to happen a little more. It is a big thing, though. I know that there have been calls in the past when you got one brand on one driver fighting and one brand on another driver fighting, and one of them loves it, and one of them is maybe like, ‘That doesn’t match our values and what we stand for.’ Like, ‘I don’t want my logo all over TV.’
“NASCAR fans aren’t like, ‘Yeah, I hate Lowe’s because my driver was fighting.’ But maybe a lot of people who don’t understand racing see that on ESPN or Good Morning America or whatever it is, and they’re like, Oh, that’s crazy. Like, it’s just maybe not positive PR. But some brands, I think especially more now, are willing to get edgier, willing to lean into it.”
NASCAR is healthiest when its drivers are superstars; when drivers cross over into the mainstream, beyond the diehard fans and NASCAR hotbeds. Every major pro team sport ascended on the backs of its superstars — Babe Ruth, Joe Namath, Bobby Orr, Michael Jordan — but fans mostly gravitated to the teams, welcoming new players into their families as long as they adorned the team crest. But NASCAR fans have virtually always been fans of drivers first, and it’s through the drivers that the sport will sustain and grow.
“I think NASCAR just needs to do what it’s known for and not care what anyone else thinks,” said Burke, in pondering what the league needs to do to succeed and grow in the years to come. “Because when NASCAR was about what they’re getting back to, in my opinion, people wanted to watch. And it got to a point where you couldn’t ignore it, and it was so valuable that once it got introduced more to pop culture, you saw it, like Talladega Nights, Cars, and in the Looney Tunes movie [where] Jeff Gordon has a cameo, Jeff Gordon hosting Saturday Night Live. You have all these different pop culture moments that still happen here or there. They’re not as big. You don’t really have drivers going on late-night shows anymore, right?
“You need the drivers to be the stars. And NASCAR’s tried that a lot and tried to incentivize that with the DAP program (Driver Ambassador Program). They’re trying to get the drivers to free up and show more of their personality.”
Burke’s own path to NASCAR fandom, and eventually a career in the sport, is illustrative of how fans get formed in the 21st century. Just enough early exposure as a kid, a favorite driver to root for, and a fandom fueled by social and community.
His path may have been more intentional and linear than most. Not everyone has their mom or dad take them to a race as a kid. But the real challenge sits in the middle of the funnel. An oddly satisfying clip or crazy crash can capture initial attention from prospective new fans. Diehard fans will talk about why their favorite driver got screwed in the last race. What about the fans in between?
How does NASCAR make sure those new fans find a community to be part of, discover a favorite driver and the other fans around him (or her!), and find a path into a sport with a 75-year legacy and a modern fandom alike?
NASCAR has always been driver-first. It just needs the next generation of transcendent superstars. The other sports leagues are figuring out what NASCAR knew all along. It was always about the athlete more than the team. In a sports world full of crests and logos, it’s the humans behind them that fans love.
