Sponsorship Activation Spotlight: Heritage
Every year on Labor Day Weekend in the US, NASCAR hosts the now famous throwback weekend in Darlington, South Carolina. The sport has embraced this concept to bring the most memorable moments from its storied past back to life. It also gives teams and sponsors a chance to do something we regularly encourage marketing teams to do - celebrate heritage. Heritage is something your competitors can never replicate from your brand and its something unique to you.
For the 2019 throwback event, we put together a concept for our clients at Shell that celebrates multiple achievements. We started with their re-entry into NASCAR and victory at the 2007 Daytona 500 with Kevin Harvick and Richard Childress Racing. We added on a celebration of RCR's 50th anniversary to further the integration.
The stars aligned for all of our partners and we are thrilled with the reaction we got from the industry and fans. See the rest of the paint scheme lineup for 2019.
Going behind the scenes
For us, it all begins with storytelling and strategy. It's not about creating a viral video. We have been tightly integrated with Shell throughout many years in the sport and our collaboration allowed for this storyline to develop. We tracked an insight across multiple events and multiple years for this campaign to be successful.
Even though this particular concept only goes back 12 years, those 12 years for Shell in NASCAR are significant. It also makes for an exciting approach because all of the parties featured in the throwback are still active in the sport today and even share a little history themselves.
The reveal video is made possible because of this. In 2010 at Pocono Raceway, three years after Harvick's Daytona 500 win, current Shell-Pennzoil driver Joey Logano was spun from contact with Harvick with two laps to go. The two had an argument on pit road after the race and Logano went on to say, "I don't know what his deal is with me, but it's probably not his fault, his wife (DeLana Harvick) wears the firesuit in the family, she tells him what to do."
These insights don't always develop in short periods of time and they sometimes take ten years or more. They don't come around often because the people inside the marketing team often move up to new positions or new programs and take these types of insights with them. Aligning with a strategic partner can help you keep consistency in your program for much longer cycles.
The results speak for themselves when you can bring insight like this to life. 60,000 engagements on 750,000 video views in the first three days. Plus a whole host of exciting comments and shares from fans.