As chief marketing officer, Jim Lyski has amped up sports marketing for the CarMax brand, competing in one of the industry’s more active categories. The company has been an on-again, off-again Super Bowl advertiser in recent years, but now sports sponsorship is being added to the mix, including new deals with the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium and with the University of Minnesota. With experience at brands including FedEx, Scotts Miracle-Gro, Nationwide Insurance and Cigna, Lyski, who joined CarMax last year, is looking to keep the distance between his company (the nation’s largest used-car retailer) and its competitors.
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Our biggest concern is how to drive strong return on our marketing investments. There’s a million ways I can spend a marketing budget now, but we need to find the ones that really drive traffic and sales. Secondarily, we’re concerned about incremental value: Are we buying and delivering something we couldn’t get more effectively elsewhere?”
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Photo by: CARMAX
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On battling clutter: As a sponsor, you have to remember that you’ll have to compete with all the other sponsors of the same thing, and even the game itself, to get your message across. You really need to find a connection with what you are sponsoring that fits and makes sense with your brand. If it’s a stretch, you’ll lose your consumer. That and creative genius are the only chances you have to break through.
On measurement: It’s advanced some. Certainly digital properties offer great accountability, so we try to tie those in whenever possible; we can even tie those in to our store traffic with CRM. The rest are broad-based measures, and broadcast advertising hasn’t changed much as far as proving [measurable] return.
On providing content: It needs be relevant and valuable. Depending on where consumers are in the purchase cycle, [brands] need to keep up with that need. Brands need to match that consumer need state with the content they deliver, whether it’s awareness a few years before they will be buying a car, to inspiration, and then when they are ready to buy, they want reviews and model data. So it’s about matching the content cycle with the purchase cycle; that’s our challenge.
On how working with sports properties has changed: They are getting more customer-centric. Early on, it was “Here’s what we’ve got. Take it or leave it.” Now, they’ve learned that if they make it feel a little more bespoke, they can command greater fees.
On what neophyte sports marketers should know: Get yourself a really good agency before you do anything (CarMax uses Wasserman Media Group). There’s just a sea of stuff out there, and you really need someone to help you navigate that. ... You should also be very specific about what business problem you are trying to solve. The more specific you can get, the more appropriate your inventory and options will be.
