NASCAR, already perceived as knee-deep in crass commercialism, took another apparent plunge Tuesday when it forced Fox to back off its excising of certain logos on computer-drawn race cars during off-track coverage.
Brian France, scion of NASCAR’s founding family and vice president for marketing, spoke of “protecting team and driver rights.”
But NASCAR critics maintain freeloading of TV advertising by corporate sponsors of individual cars isn’t a right or some sort of entitlement.
Here’s Fox, having signed away more than $1.5 billion for the privilege of catapulting NASCAR to vaster, more sophisticated public exposure than ever before, trying to transform telecast content from corn pone to caviar.
And immediately NASCAR’s bludgeons and cleavers come out, flailing at the goose that laid the golden egg–right on the heels of Fox’s first live race telecast, last Sunday’s Bud Shootout. Fox displayed cars sponsored by Budweiser, The Home Depot, Havoline, Dodge and other clients. Those companies that sponsor cars but didn’t buy sponsorship on Fox were shown without logos.
Fox, of course, wants to recoup its investment in NASCAR by selling commercial spots. That’s how its business works in a world apart from the NASCAR garages and luxury motor-coach compounds.
But a lot of car sponsors are addicted to airtime freeloading–the cars are flying billboards and drivers are paid spokesmen for products first and foremost–to which the old racing telecast networks, mainly ESPN, acquiesced so easily.
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On Madison Avenue, NASCAR sponsorship is widely considered the most cost-effective “buy” in advertising. There are companies devoted to counting the hours on hours of free advertising corporations get as their sponsored cars circle endlessly on TV. You chip in, say, $8 million a year to sponsor a car, and you might get far more value in exposure.
But this is not bargain enough. They want more. More. More.
Indeed, for some years now, national media sales reps visiting some of the car sponsors’ ad agencies have gotten the same essential message: Why should we pay you when we’ve snookered you into running our ads free on the cars and the drivers’ uniforms? Hit the bricks, buddy. We outsmarted you.
Industry sources in New York say Fox’s ad reps got more of the same when they went out to sell commercials for the Bud Shootout and for this Sunday’s Daytona 500.
Fox decided it could live with that. But, over and above the exposure ESPN was handing the car sponsors, Fox came up with a whole new graphics package for starting lineups and for cuts to commercial breaks. The graphics included computer-drawn pictures of the cars.
Fox essentially would allow as much freeloading as ESPN had–but not more. It decided that if car sponsors wouldn’t buy commercial time, it wouldn’t include sponsorship logos on the new graphics of the cars.
Fair enough?
No.
For two days, there was a tempest in and around Daytona International Speedway over 20 seconds of free airtime lost–20 seconds in a three-hour telecast of the rolling billboards. There were rumblings of drivers refusing to talk to Fox reporters, even of litigation.
They howled and whined and grumbled they were being robbed.
But how can you be robbed when you didn’t pay a penny?
Tuesday morning, NASCAR took Fox to the woodshed and bit down hard on the benefactor’s hand.
“Within 20 minutes, we knew we were moving forward,” NASCAR chief publicist John Griffin said with a perplexing sort of pride.
Hereafter, Fox will fork over the free exposure. In other words, you the viewer now are assured you will continue to have commercial messages crammed relentlessly down your throat, whether you want them or not–and not just during commercial breaks, but during the action. In your leisure time, when you’re taking a break from work and decisions about where your paycheck will go, you will continue to be pressured non-stop with appeals to buy, buy, buy, buy.
This is sport?
This is a swirling circle of one commercial after another, doing business as “lead changes.”
This was an uprising because not everybody got the same handout–a gift of graphics Fox was giving to sponsors such as Budweiser, who did buy commercial time.
This was rubbing Fox’s nose in it.
“We’ll deal with the advertisers [who paid for commercials to get the graphics bonus] and figure out a way to make it up to them,” Fox Vice President of Communications Lou D’Ermilio said.
Here stands the benefactor, in the hole, from the start.
NASCAR merrily announced that all is bright, all is well, mainstream national appeal is in sight.
“We want to build a national franchise that has great ratings,” Brian France said. “We’re off to a good start.”
And then he said the truest thing he said all day:
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“We have a long way to go.”