Impressed with the results from its activation at Pocono Raceway in August, Microsoft will use this week’s NASCAR race at Talladega Superspeedway to tout its new NASCAR app and continue its push behind Windows 10 operating system.
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Dale Earnhardt Jr. appears at a Windows 10 fan upgrade event at Pocono Raceway.
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The company, which signed separate multiyear deals with NASCAR and Hendrick Motorsports that sources valued in the low to mid-seven figures annually with significant value in kind, isn’t a title partner this weekend like it was for the Windows 10 400 at Pocono on Aug. 2. And it’s still planning a number of its activations for its first full season in the sport next year. In the meantime, Microsoft released the new app late last week and wants to further push Windows 10, so it snapped up the opportunity at ISC-owned Talladega as a one-off deal.
“We’re doing this in an intentional manner to test out what works best as we engage more,” said Jeremy Korst, Microsoft’s general manager of Windows product marketing. “The core part of the relationship is the technology that we’re working on with NASCAR and Hendrick Motorsports — it’s really a technology-centered deal. And then being able to expose that to the behemoth NASCAR fan base is a great extension of that work.”
Korst said that Microsoft’s activation zone at Talladega will be slightly larger than the one it had at Pocono, and he expects the brand will top the number of demos it did then — 7,500, which was 50 percent higher than initial projections. On top of showing off Windows 10 and the new app, which will have free and premium features ranging from interactive Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup grids to in-car audio and video, Microsoft will have its show car on display and select fans will be able to partake in Microsoft’s hospitality effort rather than solely current or prospective clients.
While Microsoft seeks business-to-business connections in NASCAR, it’s more interested in using its Windows 10 and Azure cloud-computing technology to better NASCAR’s and Hendrick’s operations. Microsoft then uses that as a case study for customers.
“Motorsports provides such a compelling, interesting story that it gets people to listen,” Korst said. “When we tell these stories about how we’re improving productivity and business performance — using the cloud to drive analytics — all these great stories apply across these other businesses.”
