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Marketing and Sponsorship

Microsoft Adding Another Race As Primary Sponsor Of Dale Jr.'s No. 88 Chevy

Liking what it is seeing with its NASCAR sponsorships thus far, Microsoft this afternoon will announce that it is adding a third paint scheme to its pact with Hendrick Motorsports: this weekend’s Pure Michigan 400 at Michigan Int'l Raceway. Microsoft GM of Windows Product Marketing Jeremy Korst, who was among the company execs on site two weeks ago at Pocono Raceway for the Windows 10 400, where he handed out the winner’s trophy to Matt Kenseth, said the company had been mulling the third paint scheme for Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s No. 88 Chevy for a while and decided to take it recently. That comes on the heels of Microsoft announcing in June separate three-year pacts with NASCAR and Hendrick that sources valued as being in the low to mid-seven figures annually with significant value in kind. It also comes on the heels of the late-July launch of Windows 10, which Korst said “has been a tremendous success so far.” Sources have said that Hendrick Motorsports generally asks $1M per race to sponsor the No. 88, but it is not known if Microsoft gets a reduced rate due to the structure of its deal, which provides all HMS employees with the Windows 10 operating system and the cloud-computing Azure platform. Korst: “We talked about it for a while and then just ultimately, based off of our experience the first couple of races, it definitely made sense from our side to go ahead and do it. The car had an opening then, it’s still close to the Windows 10 launch date … so it became kind of a no-brainer for us.”

LOOKIN’ OUT THE WINDOW: Microsoft, which will be an associate sponsor across Hendrick’s four Sprint Cup Series teams starting in ’16 and continuing in ’17, ran its first paint scheme in June at Sonoma Raceway during the Toyota/SaveMart 350. That weekend, the company brought out executives and other partners to the race for hospitality purposes and also participated in NASCAR’s Fuel For Business Summit in San Francisco. But it was at Pocono a few weeks back that the deal’s potential benefits really came into focus for Korst. He said, “This was the first time we had fan engagement (activation). We had a Windows booth right by the entry of Pocono. It was so successful -- the number of demos we did (7,500) -- was just over 50% higher than our projections. And the fans that came by were just so positive. I was surprised by the number of people who already knew about the product and were asking some pretty deep questions about it.” Korst said Microsoft is not thinking of these deals as a sponsorship but rather “a deep technology deal with NASCAR and Hendrick Motorsports, who are early adopters of Windows 10 and Azure technology -- and that is really the core partnership.” Korst: “And then what we’ve done in talking to NASCAR and Hendrick is we’ve found ways -- that make sense for both of us -- to build the brand in a genuine way as part of the experience. So that’s secondary to having a deep technology partnership, leveraging the technology and then showing fans and other business customers how the officiating body and Hendrick have been using Azure and Windows 10 to advance the sport and their business.”

A WALK IN THE CLOUDS: Korst said the company is already seeing ample amounts of business potential from the sport’s plethora of stakeholders and business partners. Korst: “This is another thing that I love about the partnership: There’s more demand and interest than frankly we can fill in the near term. We’ve had meetings with NASCAR on the list of potential projects we can work out, and one with Hendrick and brought some of our top technologists out. There’s these huge lists of projects so we’ve been trying to prioritize, and everyone’s so busy right now with the sport leading up to the Chase. So we’ve done some early things, of course, but then really trying to tee everyone up for once the Chase is done. For example, at Pocono there were a couple of NASCAR’s mobile-inspection tablets that had Windows 8 last year that we upgraded to Windows 10.” Microsoft already has leveraged NASCAR in ways such as bringing a show car down to a worldwide partner conference in Orlando a few weeks ago where attendees could snap photos with the car. It hopes to have “some strong showcase solutions” by the time the sport starts back up at next year’s Daytona 500.

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