Sport of Red States Comes to Deep Blue One
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
There’s no sign to this effect, but Nascar’s New York office is really an embassy of sorts. Housed in a nondescript office building of tinted glass on Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets, the 38-person office is charged with explaining Red America’s favorite sport to New York’s blue-chip companies, and encouraging them to invest their advertising dollars with them.
Since 1998, when corporate outreach began in earnest from the New York office, the sales team has inked deals with fifty-some companies, including Coca-Cola, Dodge, Dominos, The Home Depot, The Office Depot, Procter & Gamble, UPS, U.S. Army, Gillette, and Toyota. They now have business relationships with 97 Fortune 500 companies, more than any other professional sport.
But their greatest achievement, by far, is the estimated $750 million 10-year title-sponsorship deal with Nextel, which went into effect last year. It is the largest sponsorship in the history of sport.
Brian Corcoran, Director of Corporate Marketing, said: “We’ve really grown beyond our Southeastern roots. We’re not only a national sports entity, in being the number two sports in America, but also very much a global sports entity.”
Nascar’s sister company, International Speedway Corp., recently purchased two plots of land on Staten Island’s West Shore totaling 686 acres. It hopes to build an 80,000-person, three-quarter-mile Nascar track to open as soon as 2009, pending approval by the city.
But the most striking aspect of the pitch is the deep, symbiotic relationship sponsors can have with teams and athletes. A $10 million to $20 million primary team sponsorship, which the New York office helps facilitate with race team owners, buys a fully branded car, driver and crew uniforms, team haulers, transporters, and pit boxes, as well as the right to use drivers and cars in company marketing campaigns. It creates a situation where fans literally root for moving billboards and credit sponsors to a degree when the team and driver perform well.
“Our fans vote with their wallets. At they end of the day they recognize that their enjoyment of Nascar would not be possible without sponsorship,” said Mr. Corcoran.
“You can only imagine if the New York Jets was the McDonald’s Jets, the opportunity for the New York community to embrace the fact that if I buy more McDonald’s maybe I’d get the next Chad Pennington,” he added.
