MarketingSherpa Blog

So, you want to sponsor a NASCAR racing team? “Think big and start small,” says Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder, Go Daddy Group, Inc.

Parsons sponsors winners. He started in late 2006 as an associate sponsor of Danica Patrick, who recently made history by becoming the first woman to win an IndyCar race. Go Daddy later sponsored the Indianapolis 500 itself.

Now Parsons has moved into NASCAR by sponsoring another proven winner, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Earnhardt will drive a Go Daddy car in six nationally-televised races. That equals lots of TV time for Go Daddy.

Parsons considers the sponsorship as “kind of a big test.” The contract cost seven figures, lasts for “more than a year” and includes Earnhardt appearing in Go Daddy TV commercials.

But Parsons says that if you want to try sponsorships, your test doesn’t have to be quite as large. “For example, we could have just had a logo on the car, or paid [Earnhardt] to do a commercial or two. We could have done fewer races. We could have had a trackside booth at NASCAR races.”

“But we decided, given our experience with the IndyCar circuit…[and after running a few] test commercials with NASCAR, that we were very pleased with the results. And we use that as our reason for being a little braver moving into this than we might otherwise have been,” Parsons says.

Hey, if it works, pedal to the metal, right?

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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Categories: Consumer Marketing, Entertainment And Sports Marketing, Media Buying, Offline Marketing And Advertising Tags: Media Buying, NASCAR, sponsorships