When Gillian Zucker walked out of a meeting with management from the Auto Club of Southern California last summer, something told her that the fortunes of California Speedway were about to change.
Zucker, the president at California Speedway, and two of her top executives, vice president Dave Allen and senior director of marketing Fritz Maskrey, had spent the last two hours describing ways in which a naming-rights deal would mutually benefit the Auto Club and the racetrack.
The whispers and nods among the Auto Club executives told Zucker that their message had gotten across.
“I had never felt better about a presentation in my life,” Zucker said. “We told them stories about the fans, we used real names, we told them about their experiences. It was all about making that connection with the fan and showing the Auto Club how it could be done.”
About eight months later, after more meetings and conference calls with attorneys, California Speedway, an International Speedway Corp. property, and the Auto Club had a 10-year naming-rights deal thought to be worth the high seven figures annually. That’s about twice what Lowe’s pays for its naming rights at the Speedway Motorsports Inc. track near Charlotte, which is in negotiations for an extension of the deal, signed more than eight years ago.
California Speedway officials see their deal
with Auto Club as a turning point for the track.
ISC and its speedways typically work together on sponsorship deals. The speedway took the lead on this one, however, because it has such a deep relationship with the Auto Club, which has been a title sponsor of a race since the track opened in 1997. Auto Club is the AAA affiliate that serves 13 counties in that region.
The speedway was expected to announce the naming-rights deal last Friday before a weekend full of NASCAR events.
“Necessity breeds innovation and they’ve got the necessity, but give California Speedway credit, they’re trying,” said Trip Wheeler, vice president and general manager of Velocity, a marketing agency whose motorsports clients include Toyota and Holiday Inn. “NASCAR, like every other sport, is struggling with all of the competition that’s out there, and that’s certainly the case in [the Los Angeles] market. But if you put enough stuff on the wall, something is going to stick, and when it does, guess who gets the credit? Ms. Zucker.”
The deal is the kind of good news the embattled speedway needed. It has struggled to sell tickets in recent years to a Greater Los Angeles market that has offered a tepid response to NASCAR since the first Sprint Cup event there in 1997. The track, based in Fontana, Calif., about an hour east of Los Angeles, has been the site for two Cup events a year since 2004.
Zucker sees the naming-rights deal as a turning point for the track.
“The Auto Club is in one of every two households in Southern California,” Zucker said. “This is an area where NASCAR has not had a traditional stronghold and we’ve said that we can’t do it alone. To have a partner say, ‘We’ll do it with you,’ that’s really a model for how these things should work.”
Zucker said naming-rights deals have traditionally been a glorified media buy, a way to get the brand in front of millions of eyes. But with the speedway having so few events annually, exposure wasn’t her message when she went to the Auto Club. Instead, she pitched the ability to use track assets as a way to connect with the fans.
The outcome is a network of kiosks that will be placed at each of the entry points to the speedway beginning with the September races. After fans enter with a ticket, they’ll have the option of sliding their Auto Club card — or, if they’re not a member, their driver’s license — through a machine that reads the bar code.
Each fan is awarded a certificate that can be redeemed for tickets, pit passes, infield passes, track experiences or other awards. Here’s the catch: only Auto Club members are eligible to redeem. The Auto Club will have stations nearby where fans can sign up for memberships ranging from $47 to $102 annually and redeem their certificates.
“It’s about trying to rebuild the model of naming rights,” said Roger VanDerSnick, ISC’s senior vice president of marketing and business operations. “We don’t have the frequency of events, but we do have other benefits we can offer to deliver the desired value.”
