Underscoring its ongoing attempts to court a younger fan base, NASCAR this week will announce an official partnership with ephemeral messaging app Snapchat, plus an expanded pact with Twitter.
The Snapchat deal will be for at least four races during the 2016 Sprint Cup Series season, after NASCAR initially worked with Snapchat for two races last year as a trial. During those four 2016 races — which include this week’s Daytona 500 and a race at Talladega Superspeedway — Snapchat will feature the given event in its Live Stories section of the app.
Fans at the race can submit videos of up to 10 seconds to the section of the app dedicated to the event. Snapchat, which sets up geofencing around the track to ensure that submitted videos came from the facility, then has a team comb through those videos and compile the best ones into one continuous video that is a few minutes long and viewable on the platform for 24 hours.
The length and terms of the deal with Snapchat, which is becoming known by brands and properties as the go-to platform to reach younger demographics, were not disclosed outside of noting that Turner and Snapchat are trying to sell ads for the Live Stories. A source familiar with the way Snapchat has structured its deals with sports properties said that there may be no money changing hands. Rather, at least to start, this could be a mutual effort that helps Snapchat legitimize its product with another sports property and expand its user base, while simultaneously helping NASCAR reach the app’s highly coveted users.
“That’s just right in line with our commitment to engage with fans via content and giving them engaging ways to interact with us,” said Jill Gregory, NASCAR’s senior vice president of industry services. “Obviously, partnering with both of those [platforms] makes perfect sense. Snapchat in particular provides NASCAR with a huge platform to engage fans — and they are the newer and younger fans. … It really amplifies our efforts against that younger fan.”
Snapchat has more than 100 million active, daily users, according to Gregory, and screenshots posted online show that the Live Stories routinely draw millions and sometimes tens of millions of viewers. For example, Ben Schwerin, Snapchat’s director of partnerships who served as point person on the NASCAR deal, told digital news outlet Re/Code last year that its Live Stories draw 20 million viewers on average in a 24-hour period.
On the Twitter front, the platform will debut a Twitter emoji this week around the Daytona 500. Twitter’s @TwitterSports account also will be retweeting numerous NASCAR-related nuggets throughout the week.
