NASCAR
Roush Fenway Racing is the largest motorsports marketing organization in the world. They have a fantastic sposorship story, but it's complex, especially when you add in the broader dimension of NASCAR level and even track sponsorship programs. To help them present and explain it, Saturday Brand Communications, where I was VP, Creative, provided a site strategy, architecture, messaging and design to get it all done in this immersive microsite. The UX and content was tiered to guide a sports marketing curious-to-experienced audience into NASCAR and then, if looking at a team level, to details about a Roush sponsorship.
Since marketers are time-starved, we employed several UX measures: we kept content very hierarchical with key takeaway messages leading every section, limited opportunities for distraction and outbound navigation, and encouraged use of interactive tools. The navigation easily let's users establish where they are the sales journey and quickly find the information which is compelling to them. When we did this site, a platform this immersive and informative appeared to be a first for sports marketing. Certainly it was for NASCAR or any of the individual teams or tracks.
Custom built in Drupal, the site was highly interactive, with pop-up modals such as the track tour above. This showed with captioning and visual detail the various tactical opportunities for sponsorship activation" around a track. It's not just about decals on a car! Interactive features spoke strategy as well, such as to timing and seasonal targeting opportunities year-round, or where and mini cases to show how sponsors are achieving success in different markets. The interactive nature was both good for users to self-navigate and for RFR marketing people to present in meetings or online screenshares.
Apart from all page and content design, I also wrote the site's copy. Having both on my desk was actually helpful in that I was better able to find solutions to meet the planner's goals for UX and site architecture. I needed to support the many value pillars marketers need to work with to sell sponsorship to the likes of UPS, 3M or Scotts. Roush didn't really have a locked down tone—they are engineers and racers. But I love cars and racing, and I took the opportunity for some bold, sometimes humorous, headlines to call out parallels to other sports platforms that marketers might be more familiar with.
