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.
