The road to consumers

If John Brody sounds like a pushy truck salesman, he can be forgiven. He may be Major League Baseball’s senior vice president for corporate sales and marketing, but he possesses the energy of a neighborhood Chevrolet vendor.

“At the end of the day, our job is to help them move metal,” Brody said of MLB’s partnership with Chevy.

Such words reflect a shift in gears among auto and truck sports sponsorships. The old days of, mostly, seeking brand awareness are over. That’s oh-so-20th century for automotive companies, as antiquated as the stand-alone, 30-second commercial.

There is a mantra now, repeated by sports marketing chiefs and auto company leaders. It goes like this, as uttered by Host Communications’ Tim Campbell: “See the cars, feel the cars, touch the cars, experience the cars.”

Campbell is vice president of sponsorship sales at Host and oversees the Southeastern Conference’s new deal with Nissan. He said, “If our fans get the product in front of them, then they get the chance to make a decision to buy.”

That attitude — and the integrated marketing programs that flow from it — are in place from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association’s partnership with Chevy to the Professional Bull Riders Built Ford Tough series to the NBA’s links to Toyota to Nissan’s and Pontiac’s sponsorships in college sports.

Automotive companies continue to spend large on traditional sports advertising — more than $1.4 billion in 2006, according to a SportsBusiness Journal analysis. But marketers agree there is a race toward at-stadium programs to identify test-drivers and potential buyers, toward video and virtual-reality Web extravaganzas, and toward demographically focused events, contests and benefits.

This is all set against a grim backdrop for most auto manufacturers: Auto sales overall fell 3 percent in the United States in September; Ford’s sales dropped 20 percent and Toyota’s more than 4.4 percent. Since 2000, overall sales have been dipping.

Most leagues, teams and auto company spokespeople declined to reveal the value of their sports deals or the nature of any changes in their spending. But Ted Morris, U.S. Ski and Snowboard marketing vice president, hinted at the effects on his organization.

Morris recalled when Subaru was the governing body’s sponsor through the mid-1990s. Its deal accounted for around $5 million each year, or nearly 60 percent of USSA’s corporate sponsorship revenue then, he said. Now, with Chevy as a partner — but only for the snowboard piece of the organization — the auto sponsorship revenue accounts for about 15 percent of USSA’s $14 million in total annual sponsorship dollars, Morris said, or closer to $2 million.

Of course, that’s peanuts compared with the estimated $140 million General Motors spends each year on NFL television ads to tout its trucks, Cadillacs and Hummers. But for someone who sells fully integrated sponsorship packages, Morris admits to frustration after meetings in Detroit. In this changing partnership landscape, “It’s almost like media gets off easy,” he said.

In his realm, a costly TV commercial can’t be measured as well as more grassroots techniques, such as bringing vehicles to a mountain and letting fans sit in them, triggering thousands of qualified and quantifiable leads.

Engaging the consumer

Manufacturers have put the brakes on some sponsorship spending — as General Motors did recently in announcing that it would pull out of its deal with the U.S. Olympic Committee after the Beijing Games — but there remains an intense drive to use sports partnerships to sell more vehicles.

“I want my people and me to be totally immersed in selling as many trucks as we possibly can,” said Sean Gleason, Professional Bull Riders chief marketing officer.

Of his deal with Toyota, Mark Tatum, NBA senior vice president for marketing partnerships, said: “From the start, it wasn’t about branding. Right off the bat, it was about, ‘How do we engage with the consumer? How do we engage with our fan?’”

“Engage” is the other word of choice. Toyota marketing spokesman Chad Harp said his company has an “Engagement Marketing Team” that works on its sports partnerships.

Sports industry experts say that engagement notion has affected all partnerships, from soft drinks to snack foods to shaving razors. But for autos and trucks, the stakes are higher.

“You’re not going to make a $50,000 purchase decision based on a 30-second commercial,” said Matthew Pace, former executive vice president of GM EventWorks, who oversaw the auto giant’s sports marketing efforts. No, he said, these days vehicle manufacturers and dealers want “to drive you low on the purchase funnel for consideration, trial and purchase.”

Take PBR. With in-arena attendance exceeding 1 million fans and a TV audience hovering near 20 million fans, it’s got a customer base that skews male and that inherently loves pickup trucks. But it’s also a sport seemingly bred for the Internet.

“PBR has a very digestible sport for broadband,” Gleason said. “You can show great highlights of great rides and great wrecks in one minute.”

So Gleason has developed partnerships with the likes of YouTube, and with bronco-busting success. One YouTube clip in September garnered more than 600,000 views and was the third most-watched sports video of the month and the 37th most-watched clip of any kind of that month.

The top PBR tour is Ford branded. Ford trucks are on site at all events. Ford signs are omnipresent in the arenas and Ford is part of the PBR’s Web presence.

“You can engage the person who is interested in sports on multiple levels,” said Evan Hirsh, vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, who consults with automotive manufacturers. “You can reach them at the ballpark or online. They go to venues. They buy paraphernalia. They bet online. You need that integrated approach.”

Battle lines drawn

On a national and regional basis, Pontiac and Nissan are battling it out. Pontiac, the official performance machines of the NCAA, owns football deals on ESPN and ABC telecasts and on-site, touch-see-and-feel events around the men’s basketball Final Four.

With the launch of a new model called the Rogue this year and promotion of the Titan truck, Nissan has struck a new one-year deal with the SEC and Sports Illustrated, and has a partnership with ESPN The Magazine to promote the Heisman Trophy.

Nissan is creating opportunities for fans of SEC teams to see its vehicles up close.

Last football season, a Nissan-branded program allowed fans to cast a vote for the Heisman winner. A total of 16,183,682 votes were cast and aggregated to allow one fan vote for the trophy. Now, Nissan is taking the trophy on a tour of eight football venues this fall. Nissan vehicles will be part of the mix.

“It starts as a football experience and becomes an automotive experience,” said J Schaffer, manager of Nissan lifestyle marketing.

The conversation between Nissan and the SEC began when Campbell discovered through research that SEC fans already preferred Nissans over other truck brands and when Nissan determined it needed to capture those customers within the SEC’s wide, powerful and passionate footprint.

“We felt we had a geographic hole” that the SEC markets could fill, said Kyle Pratt, group director of integrated strategy and programs for OMD, Nissan’s media agency.

Pontiac, which signed with the NCAA in 2003, advertises on and reaches out through ESPN and CBS games nationally, plus is the official car of the Pac-10 Conference. Like Nissan, it uses the Web to get fans to take action via its votes, especially in selecting the “Game Changing Performance” on ESPN’s Thursday night football games. In that contest, viewers vote for top performers and earn scholarships for participating schools. The vote occurs online and is filled with images of Pontiac vehicles and a video of the “College GameDay” crew.

Targeted audiences

If, as some say, the tried-and-true in-stadium sign isn’t as important as it used to be, the NBA and Toyota have taken it to a new level.

As part of a mind-blowing Web presence on a site called Second Life, a self-described “3D, online, digital world imagined and created by residents,” a user can wander through a virtual NBA theme park. The virtual world includes advertising signs for the Toyota Tundra.

College football fans can go online and vote for the Pontiac “Game Changing Performance.”

At a more local, completely un-techy level, the Atlanta Braves help Lexus retain customers with an innovative parking program, since embraced by other franchises. It may seem simple enough, but Jim Allen, the Braves’ senior director of corporate sales, worked with regional Lexus dealers and devised a Lexus-only parking lot closest to Turner Field. Any fan who drives to the game in a Lexus gets the most convenient parking spots. On a well-attended game, that could mean as many as 300 Lexus vehicles become de facto ads for the brand, parked where all the ticket buyers can see them.

It still costs $12 to park, but the location is prime, Allen said. “The customers who can afford to own a Lexus aren’t as concerned about getting something for free as having some type of exclusivity or benefit.”

The perk addresses one of Lexus’ most important brand traits; more than 63 percent of its new car purchases are made by current Lexus owners, according to J.D. Power and Associates.

At baseball’s national level, sponsorship chief Brody, noting record attendance and record media buys by corporate sponsors, pointed to a purposely targeted audience as MLB’s new push. Much of MLB’s partnership with Chevrolet is geared to connect to the nation’s growing Latino market.

In 2005, MLB and Chevy created a “Latino Legends Team” and a linked TV show. Chevy is now the presenting sponsor for the Roberto Clemente Award, which honors player achievements on and off the field.

“Make no mistake it’s a concerted effort by Chevrolet and Major League Baseball to reach out to the Latino community, the Latino fan base and Latino customer base,” Brody said. “That’s an effort we’ve undertaken with great clarity and great zeal because both parties feel so strongly about the future of that segment. … Unequivocally, Chevy’s partnership with us has a focus towards the Latino community like no other partner baseball has.”

What’s next?

Amid all this technology and all these targeted reach-out-and-sell-to-someone programs, what’s next?

The NBA’s Tatum points to branded content, produced by media and corporate partners, blurring the lines between news and commercials, between media companies and their partners. Toyota, for instance, took some NBA stars back to their neighborhoods, honored their mentors and then gave their communities a car. The shows appeared on NBA TV. Nissan has also produced video content for its college sponsorships.

“I don’t know that anybody knows what’s next,” Tatum said. “We haven’t heard of it yet, but it has to be engaging with the consumer. … It has to provide a new kind of impression.”

Still, for traditionalists, Toyota and the NBA, in the fourth year of their partnership, seem to be returning to days of yesteryear, going back — to mix the metaphors — to some basic blocking and tackling. It’s branded community outreach.

Last year, Toyota refurbished courts — with the automaker’s logo on them — and gymnasiums in some NBA markets as part of its successful launch of the redesigned Tundra. This year, Toyota plans to partner with the NBA to align with the league’s various community relations initiatives, said Toyota spokesman Harp.

“We want to give back,” Harp said. “I guess it’s a feel-good program, but we wanted to take the opportunity with the NBA to do some really good philanthropy.”

And gain more exposure. When the construction workers fixed those courts, they all drove Tundra trucks. They parked them outside the sites. Everyone in the neighborhoods could see the vehicles all day long. It was part of an integrated approach to making a brand and a league visible to potential customers.

Jay Weiner is a writer in Minnesota.