NASCAR this morning announced an exec shakeup wherein Senior VP/Marketing KIM BRINK will leave the sanctioning body to assume the duty of Global Team Ford COO and be replaced by current Senior VP/Industry Services JILL GREGORY. Gregory’s new title with the sanctioning body will be Senior VP/Marketing & Industry Services, and she will oversee traditional marketing, including brand marketing, advertising, consumer marketing, marketing and media research and the sanctioning body’s creative-design department. She will report to NASCAR Exec VP & CMO STEVE PHELPS on marketing and to NASCAR Exec VP & Chief Racing Development Officer STEVE O’DONNELL on industry services. Gregory joined NASCAR in ’07 and was among the inaugural class of SBD/SBJ's "Game Changers: Women in Sports Business." For Brink, who had been in her previous position since '11, the move allows her to return to her hometown of Detroit. Phelps said of the shakeup, “There are opportunities for integration and synergy between the two groups. Jill’s group works incredibly close with the marketing group already, so from a marketing and media research and driver star power standpoint, which is the forefront of our advertising -- and things like NASCAR Salutes or our green platform -- all those things Jill helped to develop and then execute at the team and track level. So a lot of great back and forth existed between Kim and Jill. We thought it was obviously a fantastic move for Jill from a career-development standpoint, but we also think it’s absolutely the right thing and a very smart decision for the sport overall.”
SEAMLESS TRANSITION: Gregory said of her hopes for the role, “We’ve had some great success with the industry services team and having the point of view of the industry and tried to make sure the teams, tracks or drivers have been heard, and I think there’s even now a greater opportunity to do that through our marketing platforms and programs. So we can now take our marketing platforms, which are already strong and have a lot of industry integration, and get those out to the industry sooner, give them the opportunity to leverage all of the assets and resources that NASCAR puts against these programs and have us all come out stronger than ever.” Because she already worked with NASCAR’s marketing department, both Phelps and Gregory projected a seamless transition into the role. Gregory added, “If you take the Chase campaign that we’re working on for 2015, we were already integrated and industry services had a big seat at the table for that. But now, with the two groups together, that integration will happen earlier and we can bring that industry point of view to the process across all of our different programs and get it out more quickly to the industry as well.”
