For this year’s Chase for the Sprint Cup playoffs marketing campaign, NASCAR is dropping the “Battle of Nations” theme it used the last two years and is instead deploying a tweaked version of its 2016 regular-season campaign, “Ready. Set. Race.”
The new campaign, “Ready. Set. Chase,” will launch Tuesday. It will be heavy on the digital and social fronts, and also have TV and at-track components. Whereas the “Ready. Set. Race” campaign was based around the desire to race others, “Ready. Set. Chase” is altered to focus on the notion of chasing or being chased.
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Everyday people, and sometimes animals, in full sprint will highlight the campaign for the Sprint Cup playoffs.
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“We built [the “Ready. Set. Race”] campaign around the love of racing and how that’s inherent in all of us,” said Jill Gregory, NASCAR’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “When you look at the Chase component, things really get elevated — the thrill, passion, excitement get heightened when you’re being chased — and we’re going to share that theme and excitement with the fans.”
The campaign had a soft start this past Saturday when the TV spot for the 10-week playoff period debuted during the Sprint Cup Series race at Richmond International Raceway, which was the final event of the regular season. The spot, produced by NASCAR’s agency, Ogilvy & Mather, New York, intersperses clips of cheetahs, dogs and everyday people chasing after something in a full sprint, with snippets of on-track action.
NASCAR also will work with Ogilvy to create digital action videos immediately following the four elimination rounds. The digital shorts will mimic the drama that was just seen on track. The first of the five-part series will debut heading into the Chase and shows reigning series champion Kyle Busch being chased on foot through a warehouse by his competitors. NASCAR, which will shoot the videos on Mondays and Tuesdays before debuting them later in the week, will use stunt doubles as well as pre-shot footage of the actual drivers. The clips will be shared socially and digitally, and potentially on TV.
“One thing we wanted to be sure to deliver on this year was keeping that [theme] throughout the entire Chase period,” Gregory said. “So kind of re-creating real-time action after it has happened during each round of the Chase will keep that content fresh from round to round.”
From a social media perspective, NASCAR will have a heavy presence across multiple platforms and will experiment with some of those platforms’ new offerings, such as Facebook Live or Instagram Stories. The sanctioning body also will use Snapchat’s Live Stories feature at two Chase races — Charlotte and the season finale at Homestead — and has commissioned a Chase-specific Twitter emoji that will appear whenever users tweet with the hashtag #TheChase. NASCAR will once again tag all social posts with that hashtag to create an area where fans can find all the social content that is being pumped out around the playoffs.
On NASCAR.com, NASCAR will again run its Chase Grid Game in which fans who correctly pick which drivers will advance to next rounds can win prizes of race-used memorabilia.
The three manufacturers in the sport, Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota, also will have a presence throughout the 10 weeks, with each running Chase-specific content and separate sweepstakes that include a grand prize of a new vehicle and trip for two to NASCAR’s Champion’s Week in Las Vegas in December.
