The case for sports marketing
Smart brands are shifting spend from programmatic marketing to sports.
Here at CW Moto we are avid motorcyclists, racing fans and we live and breathe motorsports and racing.
And we’re also huge nerds.
Once in awhile, those two things are going to intersect, and this is one of those times.
When I’m not handling strategic comms and schlepping tires for CW Moto Racing, I am a strategy consultant who helps large organizations change. Yes, that’s a job (a big one).
And I landed there after a long career in word-of-mouth marketing then Big Advertising. I started my first successful online content company in 1993 and by 2016 I was the strategic architect for the North American social media “internal agency” for five trademark brands in one of the 10 largest CPG companies in the world (including key sports activations).
I started back in the organic, human days: where the internet was a tool for humans to connect with each other based on the quality of their content and their creativity finding, reaching and attracting (then keeping) people who might be interested in their stories.
And I evolved with the industry as the platforms entered the picture:
First — expanding the ability for humans to connect with each other based on the quality of their content and ability to connect around shared interests
Then — adding features for businesses to connect with humans (and vice versa) BUT few brands were able to be successful with that based on actually creating quality content and meaningfully connecting, so then
The platforms — by design — started actively contracting the ability for businesses and humans to connect with each other by shifting to pay-for-play models that allow brands and businesses who aren’t capable of creating a “human-like” connection with people to pay for access to those valuable eyeballs they need to buy things.
And because the platforms are where the eyeballs are (and the platforms are designed specifically to keep the eyeballs on them to an addictive degree) brands ponied up.
The US social network ad spending forecast for 2021 was over $40 billion. And that’s just social ads, not search and other forms of display. (And those ads also require expensive creative production — a single multiple-million dollar ad campaign may involve six figures worth of supporting content production.)
Online content and advertising is now huge business. With many layers of middlemen each taking their cut of the pie, and each one incentivized to show ROI in the forms of big numbers that look good in charts and graphs in slides. And all necessary because most brands, still, don’t know how to reach and connect with humans around what those humans are actually interested in and/or find relevant.
So where does that leave us?
2021 has been a bad year in the press for programmatic advertising (forms of advertising where algorithms make the decision about where and when an ad is placed, including social media advertising, network-based display advertising and search marketing).
A few statistics from an excellent article by Scott Galloway:
89% of dollars spent on digital advertising today are spent on programmatic ad buys
By one estimate, 88% of digital ad clicks may be fraudulent (via Galloway, citing this source)
Targeting something as basic as gender was unsuccessful more than half the time (i.e., it was worse than random)(via Galloway, citing this source)
This is getting a bit wonky so let me boil it down
Brands are spending huge money to pay multiple levels of robots owned by middlemen (who each need a slice of the pie) to try to get their content in front of the humans they’re trying to reach while the algorithms are — at a very high rate — actually displaying that content to other robots and/or fake / fraudulent accounts.
Yes, I know too much
I’m not an unbiased observer of this all — I was a participant in it for many years. When platforms made it harder for content creators and brands to get their content seen without paid advertising, I moved with the tides and moved into work that bridged content and advertising. It makes sense to me that the platforms brands and content creators benefit from make their slice of the money — they are not charitable organizations, after all.
My job, for years, was to use human experiences and social media to influence human behavior. To carefully architect experiences to get you to click, talk, provide your personal information and/or get you to spend money and then tell your friends how happy you are that you spent your money. That was my job. And I was really good at it. Until I walked into a large auditorium-like room at a client site one day to receive my newest assignment
to build a behavior-influencing campaign to get kids between the ages of 8 and 13 to consume more soda pop through social and digital activation
and I left that meeting, called the agency I was working with at the time and told them my tenure with that client was complete and they could expect me home as soon as I could book a flight and pack my suitcase.
A few months later I left advertising for good.
And even so, I’m not opposed to advertising on principal: but I am no longer interested in systems of advertising that replace human creation, connection and community with poorly-trained and poorly-targeted robots (e.g. programmatic advertising).
And this isn’t just me having a bit of an activist bend.
We’re hearing this over and over in our exploratory conversations with potential partner brands, right now, in preparation for the 2022 season. We reach out to endemic (motorcycle industry) and non-endemic brands, and among the non-endemic brands we considered a huge longshot on our outreach, the ones who’ve returned our calls this year are the ones who are actively looking for alternatives to test spends that they’re taking away from programmatic paid digital media because of all of the above.
What’s the answer?
The more things change, the more things stay the same. The answer, again, is to create awesome human experiences, and then share excellent stories about those awesome human experiences. If the human experience is awesome enough, you don’t even have to talk about it: people will do that for you.
A quick example. Love or hate them, Apple is one of the most influential (and beloved by their biggest fans) brands of our time. So pop quiz:
How many times has Apple tweeted about their products since they joined the platform in September of 2011?
Which creative agency produces the content for Apple’s Instagram channel?
How many millions of times does Apple get mentioned in social in a given year despite their completely unconventional approach to social media?
Have you locked your answers?
Then read on:
Zero
Users create the content for Apple’s Instagram channel (there are agencies involved, but ultimately, the photography is by actual iPhone users)
We don’t know, but back in 2014 that number was over 560 million times in Twitter alone. (They also saw mentions in 7.5 million blog posts, 6.6 million online news articles, and 25.9 million forum posts that same year.)
Apple does use digital (and programmatic) advertising. But Apple holds the market position and share of voice it does because they create exceptional brand and product experiences that compel people to share those experiences with their friends. They let the audience do the talking (and talk and share, and spend money, they do).
“But we’re not Apple.”
I get it. My brand isn’t Apple either. I’m a strategy consultant whose work is so obscure it will literally never pass the “Mom Test.”
Your brand may not know how to create a human experience, culture-changing product, or even a story compelling enough for people to notice it, listen, and care.
But that’s where sports comes into the picture.
Yes, I’m a nerdy, boring strategy consultant.
And I also sponsor motorcycle racing teams and riders because they (we) create those types of experiences and stories.
Supporting motorsports athletes and teams puts my (boring, corporate) brand in front of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of humans across the country and globe each season. The vast majority of them may never notice my artful little logo. But some do. And they’re actual humans (not bots). And like any other tight-knit, interest-based community, when they do, they pay special attention.
Sports help brands build actual love
Last year, Kyle Wyman — one of the premiere Superbike team / riders — brought a non-endemic brand into the paddock: Panera Bread. Now, I don’t have access to the data on that brand partnership, but I must tell you: I’ve never heard a community (motorcyclists) talk about sandwiches so much in my life as I did during the 2021 season. Not only was Panera prominently visible during every race round in the coverage of racing thanks to Kyle’s eye-catching livery and his (excellent) use of social and digital content himself.
In between rounds, my (personal) social media was a steady stream of Kyle and his fans talking about bread.
Bread.
What Kyle achieved for Panera was the pinnacle of brand marketing:
brand love.
You can’t buy brand love with programmatic advertising. You can’t manufacture brand love with seven-figure spends on creative agencies and advertising (you can achieve awareness and consideration, and the best campaigns create brand affinity — but this kind of love is a few clicks beyond affinity or preference on the emotional scale).
Fans (and teams) spend money with the brands they see in our paddock
Mission Foods secured the naming rights for the first championship season of the King of the Baggers, and changed decades of buying behavior for at least a segment of the MotoAmerica fan audience. Our household is an example: we had a strong preference for another brand for tortillas and tortilla chips, and we have been brand-loyal to Mission ever since they showed up in the paddock.
Mission, according to my chats with their field team this season, chose the MotoAmerica paddock to invest in after looking across the entire suite of pro sports and finding MotoAmerica to be
an exceptionally high value for their spend, and,
a way to reach increasingly diverse audiences around their shared interests across cultural divides.
How did Mission overcome decades of my family’s buying preferences?
By showing up in our paddock with passion. And we put our dollars back into the brands (and teams) that show up in our paddock, whenever possible.
Why even pro teams need sponsors
The economics of our particular sport are — interesting. Motorcycling in the US is a relatively small sector as business sectors go, and road racing is a very expensive operating environment for a niche within a fringe that represents a true labor of love. There are endemic brands and some large teams making money doing this, but they’re the profound exception. In any given race class, there may be two or three teams with money (and passion), and the racing would be really boring if only those teams gridded up.
It takes a full grid for racing to be interesting. And that means that perhaps 90% of the bikes on the grid are not from money teams. The other 90% of the bikes on the grid are from passion teams who are spending their own money to be out there.
And today’s passion teams may be tomorrow’s money and passion teams, and that’s the cycle of this sport. And fans love the money teams (and fans love the underdogs). So while the race series and a few large teams get the disproportionate share of financial support
racing doesn’t happen without the rest of us.
And fans know it.
So fans (and teams) support the large teams and the small teams and exhibit buying preference for the brands that show up in our paddock, because it takes all of us to have a race. Our sport is such a labor of love that teams and many of the most serious fans — the ones who show up to walk the paddock at our events — know: nobody out there has it easy and every dollar we spend in the paddock helps us all do what we love despite the incredulous stares we all get from our accountants and bookkeepers.
People are more interested in their interests than your brands and products
That’s harsh: I’m not saying your brand and product aren’t important — they are, and we can’t do what we do without brands doing what you do.
and it’s also true: people are more interested in what they’re interested in, than in what your brand wants to say to them or which product you want them to buy next.
We spend all year talking to fans and friends and our supporters who all say the same thing: “What you’re doing is so cool…” and some finish the sentence with “… I wish I could do what you’re doing,” and others don’t say it but you can hear them think it. We remind folks: “you can do it too,” at every turn — there was nothing that made us special or uniquely qualified to turn up for our first season in the MotoAmerica paddock other than my husband’s desire to run a race team on that stage and my passion for racing and motorcycle people that made me willing to co-sign his dream. It’s not rocket science. We have all the same hurdles as any other family: a mortgage, a monthly child support payment, a visitation schedule, our “day jobs.” There’s never enough money or time. But we prioritize living life really really well and part of living life well for us is having a life together in professional racing.
So people are interested in and inspired by us (and everyone else in the paddock) and what we and our teammates and paddockmates do because we’re all out there living. And fans (and brands) help us do so. They’re there when we’re finishing in the points (everyone loves a winner), and they keep us going when times are challenging (because there’s always love for an underdog).
We love the brands who help us do what we do. We don’t make our living doing this: we spend our living and lives to do this. And brands providing us support help us do this better and invest and work our way toward building the motorsports technology and racing company our business plan describes.
I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to work really, really hard in the MotoAmerica paddock. Between my husband, myself and our businesses, we spend six-figures-worth of dollars a year for the privilege of spending ten weekends a year working — laboring — at what we’re best at: helping someone more talented than us pilot a motorcycle around a racetrack as fast as she or he can.
And our team is powered by a supply list that would blow your mind. There are thousands of non-moving parts involved with getting that rider and that motorcycle onto the track for each race, and that’s not counting the rider and their readiness and performance needs, or the bike and its hungry gas tank and necessity of new “shoes” (tires) multiple times per weekend. We live on snack bars, coffee, hydration products, and convenience store meals (WaWa, we miss you); we live on meal boxes at home because there isn’t time to cook.
We go through three pairs of sneakers per person season because of the size of our paddocks and amount of running we do each weekend, and my athletic wearable shows me my heart rate during qualifying and race weekends (I could overlay my heart rate data with our rider’s on-track data and tell you what happened when based on the overlap).
I have a favorite magnetic eyelash brand that helps me feel TV-camera-ready even when I haven’t been near a shower in days, am schlepping tires, or cooking lunch for the team. We bring bubbly water instead of beer to race rounds and give it away generously to help keep folks refreshed and hydrated when the weather is hot.
We run our team (and our businesses) at home and on the road with technology — hardware, software, peripherals, and services — just like any other business
(but it looks way cooler on the internet than the average cubicle or work from home desk in an office).
And we share it all with our fans, friends and family. Through content and social media, and also through word of mouth (the old fashioned, human-to-human kind).
And those friends, family and fans move from awareness through consideration to trial more quickly than the norm because they know and trust us (and because we hold that trust to be as sacred as our responsibility to and relationship with your brand).
So if your brand and product deliver on your part of the experience, we’re a shortcut for you to achieve brand love that’s yours to keep at a remarkably small spend level given the value of that bond.
Now, the crux question:
Which sounds like the more worthy and interesting way for your brand to light money on fire in 2022?
Would you rather:
Write a six- or seven-figure check to an agency to build ads and spend money on robots showing (mostly) other robots your ad in the hops that some human you’re targeting with approximately the accuracy of random chance will see that ad enough times to remember your brand or product and/or click on that ad? - or -
Write a four-, five- or six-figure check to a sports team like ours to bring your brand and product along for a season with exposure to tens or hundreds of thousands of people in person, via social media and digital content, and earned media? And ultimately: have a chance at achieving actual brand love and advocacy with a few hundred or thousand (who may reach hundreds of thousands on your behalf)?
Yes, I’m biased, but I know where I’m putting my own five-figure marketing budget for 2022. And it’s not into robots.
What about Web 3? NFTs? Crypto?
Let’s tackle Web 3 first. What I’m talking about here is Web 3. I’m a fast follower (and skeptic) of these technological generational changes, but there’s one thought leader in the space I trust: Zoe Scaman. Zoe is Bodacious, a strategy studio working at the forefront of content, creators, community and culture.
Zoe recently amplified a couple of tweet threads that line up quite nicely with the arguments I’m making here from Chris Dixon, a Web3 investor with a large, influential VC organization (the same venture org that lists Facebook, Lyft and AirBNB among their IPOs).
Chris goes on to describe the downsides of businesses that get build based on advertising. It’s a good read. He then continues:
We’re one of those user/builders creating networks (and communities) as genuine owners.
Web 3 is here: we’re already doing it.
And individual investors and patrons of the arts are, right now, gambling and speculating on NFTs and crypto (and some are making huge money, and many are losing big).
We are art-nerds, makers and patrons of the arts ourselves (and both of us have backgrounds in and are passionate about creative fields that rely on patronage — not just ROI-seeking investment — to survive).
And for now we’re focused on more analog forms of making. But if you’re a patron looking for interesting and rewarding vehicles for patronage: sports team support is no more speculative than dropping your dollars on NFTs and/or into that crypto wallet. You may have a windfall with your NFT or crypto (and you may not).
It may seem less likely you’ll have a windfall based on writing a check to a sports program you love (but I can’t say it’s any more speculative than crypto or NFTs, if you think about the long term). The ROI (and risk) may not be as financially transactional as your crypto wallet looks. But the non-economic ROI (which may lead to future economic ROI) is extremely high-potential, should you choose to leave your keyboard and show up for a race round (or other sports event, if racing isn’t your passion).
Let me break that down:
Imagine who you may meet in “meatspace” if you write a check to a team, put on your team-only jersey, show up for a race weekend, enjoy yourself, talk to people, participate in the special experiences your favorite team provides, and watch some racing.
You may meet your favorite pro athletes (and the upstart riders and teams who will win the championship in a few years and you’ll earn the right to say “I knew them when”).
You may cross paths with a verifiable movie star who happens to love the same sport you do (and find that the rumors are true: they’re really that nice).
You may chat with the person next to you in line at the concession stand because you see a brand’s logo on their fan shirt and find yourself talking to the CEO of the company.
I can’t speak for all sports, but if you haven’t been there live, you’d be shocked to experience the access and serendipity a trip to the MotoAmerica paddock provides fans. And you’d be doubly-shocked to analyze the population that turns up in person and/or follows along from home via social and digital.
I’ve met potential corporate strategy clients in the paddock after conversations that started with the specs on our Twins Cup bike. We’ve met the owners of large, established, successful brands we admire in our fields because their dog spotted Chris as a dog-person from across the paddock and wiggle-wagged their way over for a belly-rub. And we’ve met literal legends of our sport by walking our dog in the paddock.
I met a fellow uber-fan through Twitter and then in person at last year’s Laguna Seca round, whose company we’ve now hired for educational tutoring and coaching for one of our kids and whose work is (no joke) changing our kids’ life at a really pivotal time in her learning development.
(An aside: our eleven-year-old who’s been suffering her way through her math classes for the last two years shared across the dinner table that her tutoring from Motivation Matters has helped her become “more confident about test-taking,” because she feels “more prepared for her tests, since she’s getting more practice.”
Motivation Matters is not a sponsor of our team. We pay full price for their services because they support other teams in our paddock. And we are so delighted with the service they provide that here I am, shouting my brand love for them from this proverbial rooftop.)
And speaking of the kids: aside from the benefits our girls gain from everything consequential and experiential they gather by being part of a racing family
they’re (literally) on the review team for this article (hi, girls!)
and they’re (also literally) helping us build the Web3 content and community strategy for CW Moto Racing because they’re fluent in channels and behavior trends we’re not (and that your agency is only starting to think about pulling together focus groups around).
If I’m the one speculating
I’m choosing the odds of those human connections over buying an NFT or topping off a crypto wallet right now. (And it’s also not an either-or … you can do both.)
That’s my case for independent professional (and amateur) sports patronage in 2022.
Teams like us and professionals like me will keep doing what we’ve always done:
Do interesting, relevant things
Create compelling human experiences to share those things with others
Make helpful and/or entertaining content to share those stories with others
Build, join, and be great neighbors in existing communities where people gather around interests, and
Capitalize on the buzz and uptake we achieve together to extend momentum of the stories and messages we want to share.
I’ve been using stories to help humans think / feel / do for my entire career. Sometimes machines have been more (and less) helpful so I prefer to focus on what I can influence directly:
experiences and stories that help humans think, feel, and do.
I’m glad to see that what some of us have been saying about programmatic advertising for years is finally reaching brand marketers. I know it is, because I’m hearing it on my CW Moto Racing brand partnership calls this season.
So I’ll ask again:
What is the most worthy and interesting way for your brand to light money on fire in 2022?
If you’re a brand who might consider diverting four or five digits worth of your budget toward our team, we’d love to meet you. Connect by phone, video call, via email at sara [at] cw moto [dot] com and/or via that email address to schedule with us in person in the greater Puget Sound region.
If you’d like a bit more background on our program:
Here’s a one-sheet for potential supporters more generally (brands and/or patrons and individual supporters)
And if you’d like the full meal deal with the most recent copy of our full Season Preview for 2022, you’ll find that here.
We’re also doing work to help athletes up their game off the bike, to increase their impact on behalf of brand sponsors. Here’s a toolkit on how to be your sponsors’ favorite racer you can point athletes toward, which we’ve heard from readers is applicable way beyond just motorsports.
And if this has managed to land in front of an enterprise brand reader who’s skeptical about working with a newer and/or smaller team,
we’d be happy to introduce you to our friends in the Premium Superbike paddock, and/or
teams like us don’t benefit financially from brands sponsoring the series, but without series sponsorship we don’t have a place to race — so if you’re curious to learn more about sponsorship at the series level, here’s MotoAmerica’s latest series overview for 2021.
And when you reach out, please tell them CW Moto sent you.
About the author
Sara Lobkovich is the founder and principal consultant at Red Currant Collective, a strategy and change consultancy that helps thinky-doers and status quo challengers create more impactful, joyful, and just workplaces.
She’s launching From Think to Do, a podcast and resource hub for strategists, status-quo challengers, change leaders, thinky-doers and curious observers and influencers of the world of work.
She’s also co-owner of CW Moto Racing and Counter Weight Motorsport, a pacific-northwest-based MotoAmerica team and motorcycle technology, performance and speed shop. She’s the creator and voice of The Moto Curious, a podcast that aims to increase access and inclusion in the motorsports community one Q&A at a time.
Connect with her directly via email at sara [at] cw moto [dot] com.
