Editor’s note: This story is revised from the print edition.
MVPIndex is finding more inroads into the NASCAR space, where the firm is vying to become the leading social media measurement and valuation tool.
Over the last year and a half, the Dallas-based firm, which tracks social media reach, engagement and conversation sentiment using a proprietary algorithm, has signed official partnerships with five NASCAR teams, including Sprint Cup outfits Hendrick Motorsports, Team Penske and Richard Petty Motorsports.
MVPIndex’s clients
in NASCAR:
■ Hendrick Motorsports
■ Team Penske
■ Richard Petty Motorsports
■ Kaulig Racing
■ Make Motorsports
■ Speedway Motorsports Inc.
■ MillerCoors
■ Taylor
Source: MVPIndex
The company also is working with sponsor MillerCoors, racetrack promoter Speedway Motorsports Inc. and PR agency Taylor, and has consulted with drivers, has worked on events such as Chip Ganassi Racing’s Sound Garage and is pitching numerous other teams and entities in motorsports on deals.
Stout Partners’ Kyle Nelson and Shawn Spieth, father of golfer Jordan Spieth, founded MVPIndex in 2014.
For regular reports, MVPIndex charges users a monthly rate that varies based on the number of brand categories that a client wants to have tracked, according to sources.
“NASCAR teams look at the car as real estate; we look at the conversation [around the sport] as a conversational piece of real estate,” said Nelson, whose background is in software and social media. “When you consider that people that are fans of sports spend more time on social than watching a race or attending a race … it makes sense for someone to come in and measure that.”
Using a database that it filled with every social media post made by 30,000 athletes and 1,000 teams dating to 2006 across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Google+, MVPIndex is able to compare things like which driver is performing best on social media in a given sponsorship category, how a brand’s campaign fared versus similar ones, and which type of post elicited the most engagement. The company also puts its own dollar value on overall sponsorships or individual campaigns, which is important in NASCAR because it comes at a time when teams are trying to find new ways to show value to partners amid sagging TV ratings.
“The biggest piece was their ability to give a trustworthy, defensible monetary number that we feel confident sharing with partners,” said Tony Mayhoff, manager of business development for Xfinity Series team JR Motorsports, which has a deal with MVPIndex. “It’s one thing to just give standard metrics and impressions around social. It’s another thing to add a value to it, like Joyce Julius does with television.”
An example of MVPIndex’s work came earlier this season when it tracked the Warner Bros. “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” Hero Face Off campaign that ran in conjunction with Hendrick Motorsports partner DC Comics around the March race at Auto Club Speedway.
For that activation, the Chevrolets of Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson carried Batman and Superman paint schemes, respectively, to coincide with the movie’s national release that month. Social media accounts affiliated with NASCAR, Hendrick and the drivers’ respective primary sponsors — Nationwide Insurance and Lowe’s — went heavy on messaging not just during race weekend but in the two months leading up to it. MVPIndex’s data showed that those partners earned an estimated $3.6 million worth of social media value for the campaign around the promotion.
“The majority of the content was driven by social and digital, so we were looking for a way to measure that,” said Shannon Hooper, Hendrick’s director of partnership development. “The numbers were great around the broadcast, so that was one piece of it. But we wanted to be able to say, ‘But our campaign really started eight weeks prior to that, and what is the number around that?’”
Competitors in the burgeoning space for MVPIndex, which solicits all of its NASCAR business in-house, include Hookit and Opendorse.
