There are few online to offline success stories. Often they are limited to large brands who are either part of the technology industry or whose consumer base are early adopters to technology trends. Which is why when Media Trust, ranked as the 9th fastest growing company by Inc Magazine, joined forces with a little known driver outside of NASCAR circles named Joe Nemechek no one expected quick success. The results surprised everyone. I sat down with Peter Bordes, CEO of MediaTrust, to discuss that success.
How did the deal come together with Global Media Minds, Joe Nemechek, and NASCAR?
The whole thing happened very rapidly. In NASCAR there has been a contraction in the amount of sponsorship money available for drivers due to the economy. GMM approached us literally weeks before the racing season started with the idea. We decided to take on the challenge as a case study with the goal of creating a different way of packaging various elements of online marketing within the world of NASCAR racing. GMM had all these parts for Joe in place that weren’t really being leveraged: a late 90’s style website, a Twitter account that was sort of being used, and a Facebook account that was only partially up to date. Nothing was really integrated together. So we ripped it apart and put it together in the short timeframe we had. What you see now is just version one of our concept, there are two or three more evolutions yet to come.
How has the response been?
I have to say the attention we’ve gotten so far with this project is phenomenal. We built the Media Trust brand leveraging social media but I don’t think you really understand the concept of engagement until you get behind the wheel of a social campaign with someone that is a celebrity. We first looked at Joe Nemechek’s personal site and his official site NEMCO Motorsports but decided that we should start from scratch with FrontRowJoe.com.
So we started with the fundamentals putting all the pieces together, setting up tracking to measure sign-ups and clicks, integrating Twitter and Facebook, getting Joe to personally buy into using the social platforms more methodically. Joe began posting regularly and the following grew quickly from about a thousand to just under five thousand users in Facebook and took the Twitter from in the hundreds to just under three thousand.
It’s groundbreaking because none of the other NASCAR drivers, to my knowledge, are remotely leveraging social media the way we did. Our efforts actually brought in two sponsors. One of these is England’s Stove Works, which is not necessarily a typical sponsor. We were able to drive a half a million dollars in sponsorship revenue. For having put everything together in three weeks we’ve been enormously successful.
It’s kind of allowing Joe to be real spokesperson. Instead of the drivers just wearing the logos he can actually talk to the audience and react.
Exactly! When we began working on the campaign we spoke with other companies who had sponsored NASCAR drivers and they all said, “We love NASCAR but we just could never figure out what our return was from it.” I talked to the CEO of Liberty Medical and he’s like “I love what you guys are doing!” And he even sent me a picture of his car and was like, “We love NASCAR, we’d love to sponsor it, I just couldn’t figure out how to make sense of it.” Because what is my logo on the car worth?
But if you can have the driver talking about Liberty Medical its like now he’s off and running. When the driver is talking about the brand you need the mechanisms in place to be able to really connect with the fan base. Not just through some static website but through interactive mediums like Facebook and Twitter. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll see people coming to that brand and transacting.
That’s how it was with England Stove Works. We drove half a million dollars worth of transactions initiated by our efforts with FrontRowJoe! In a way Joe became a super affiliate. That success with this experiment can certainly be replicated.
Quite an experiment; it seems to have out reached its goals. What were Joe’s team and GMM initially hoping for from this?
We really had no idea. This was a complete and total shot in the dark but it was better than nothing. Joe’s agency had been working with us on other projects and knew that we were able to look at the broad online universe and take a holistic new approach to the channel. It was either that or nothing so what have we got to loose in trying something new? Let’s leverage Joe’s passion for the fans and history as a driver and see if we can possibly generate revenue online. Let’s experiment and find out, we have nothing to lose, we have a willing driver, we have a great agency and a group of people to work plus if this model works it can be replicated within the NASCAR industry.
I’d say this has gone metric wise way past anything we could possibly imagine. What’s great is that the season’s not even over yet and we’re definitely going to have a phenomenal case study.
How did you track the affiliate and social media ROI?
Everything was built in a dynamic environment so we could look at the results daily and start tweaking the campaign as we went. First there was the car itself which had no sponsors, so we thought “Let’s make Joe his own sponsor and put FrontRowJoe.com all over the car.” That would drive fans to a website designed purely with marketing in mind. We started to track metrics to optimize: how many people were coming in, from where were they engaging, what were they signing up for, the newsletter, what products were they clicking on.
Using Google Analytics we measured which channel, Twitter or Facebook, was stronger giving us a very clear picture of our efforts right down to the Tweet. We could see which Tweets and posts in Facebook worked, what type of call actions we used in the posts did not. It’s been a very effective mechanism for allowing us to adjust as we go.
For the affiliate side, to track offers, we used our own proprietary affiliate tracking technology. It’s really very interesting, prior to working with Joe, I didn’t realize how many affiliates are NASCAR fans. It’s huge!
For the New England Stove sponsorship we set up a tracking mechanism on their website. When a user came from NASCAR a special discount or offer would trigger so we could see what the effect of the traffic that we were sending out was.
How are the offers on Front Row Joe picked?
At first it was fairly blind. We just looked at the demographics, the geographics, the “demo-geos”, and where the races were held. We guessed the categories that would be popular, like DirectTV and offers from Force Factor because that was primarily more the “demo-geo” of Middle America. As the clicks came in we started to find out there were more females interacting with Joe and with NASCAR drivers than there were males which was something that none of us would have expected. So what we are now doing is looking at the data of who is signing up into the database and which offers are getting interacted with. Currently all the optimization is being done by hand but we’ll start applying technology to it.
So now that you’ve had this success what do you hope to replicate from the lessons you’ve learned?
What we want to do is really turn Front Row Joe into an actual brand. Not only for Joe, himself, but for NASCAR. The website will be completely rebuilt to focus on providing unique content from each race for the fans with content from the pits, from the front row with the drivers and will also provide visitors a much deeper integration with social media sharing features. There have actually been other drivers that are interested in taking part after having seen this. Everyone is pretty astounded by the success, especially considering Joe has crashed and burned in every race but yet you’re still getting this incredible traction with the sponsors and the fans.
Once someone has gained some affinity with the fans it doesn’t necessarily matter if they’ve placed in the winner’s circle because they’ve built up this relationship over the years.
Exactly! You know Angel, I’ve got a pretty big following within online marketing industry but I’ve never been able to generate the kind of response with my personal Tweets as I’ve seen Joe generate with NASCAR fans. The speed and responsiveness from those fans is just phenomenal! People are coming up to Joe in the pits and saying, “I saw your Tweet, “it’s faster than a tweeting bullet” that was great!”
My background is in mass media. Mass media and mass marketing is changing forever to “me media” and “me marketing” and I think this is a great demonstration of that. And relationship is the point because consumers are getting so smart they can tell if someone has an authentic social presence or not. We have tons of people coming on the site and saying, “Joe, is this really Joe?”
Which is why it’s important to have Joe excited and fully involved for this to work. You have to have the authenticity of the voice of these guys and this is what we’ve done with just one of them. The success certainly can be replicated.
Still, you have to be a little careful not to bastardize this because there is a lot of responsibility that comes along with engaging fans. Social media is unregulated and if marketing agencies get a hold of a medium for the wrong reasons it can totally ruin this channel just as quickly as it ruined other channels. I think there’s a big responsibility that comes along with this as we start seeing power of harnessing social media. Done right it can create a lot of value for the fans.
Here is the original:
MediaTrust Sets the Pace with NASCAR Success
All 64 games of the tournament can be watched free online, a gamble which has paid off for CBS. Removing the paywalls and other restrictions to online viewing while maximizing distribution has paid off big. CBS has seen online ad revenues grow from $4 million in 2006 to this year’s $37 million total.
