You probably know her best for her star turn in the infamous GoDaddy TV spots (particularly during the Super Bowl).
But newly-adapted Sprint Cup Series driver Danica Patrick got known this past weekend for her need for speed, surpassing even longtime Nascar guru Jeff Gordon for the pole position in this weekend's Daytona 500.
Danica's No. 10 Chevrolet SS turned in a lap at 196.434 miles per hour, enough to put Patrick in the pole spot for Nascar's most prestigious race. Considering that the US television ratings for the Daytona 500 have been the highest for any auto race during the year since 1995, one might wonder if a marketing conspiracy was afoot.
Actually, the timing couldn't be more perfect. Nascar just changed its marketing firm, dumping Jump Company in St. Louis for the very same firm IBM hired to lead its marketing renaissance in 1993, Ogilvy and Mather.
New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott explains it all in a column timestamped yesterday, the gist of which explains that Ogilvy and Mather is going to bring the drivers front and center in the new initiative.
First, they'll be featured in a series of TV ads that "presents drivers in larger-than-life poses," and also encourages drivers to aggressively contact fans and followers in the social media.
This is definitely not my redneck uncle's tobacco-chewing, Budweiser-sipping Nascar.
Many moons ago, circa 1999, I tried to convince my own marketing amigos in IBM's advertising organization that we should be all over Nascar. They laughed me out of the room -- we go in more for golf and tennis, and to just keep things fresh and intellectually challenging, every once and again some chess and Jeopardy!
But I knew then, as so many do now, that Nascar races were excellent venues for CEOs to conduct business, many of whom would fly in and out for Nascar races, and that the sport of Nascar was poised for a significant uptick in popularity as its reach stretched beyond Bubba-dom.
Just as importantly, the amount of data that the cars and races generated was, to my view, a virtual feast for sponsorship by an information technology company, especially one like ours that specializes in database and business analytics technologies.
And so, it seems, the time for more technology in stock car racing is ripe.
Forget for a moment Danica Patrick's partnership with domain registrar GoDaddy.
Nascar CEO Brian France just recently announced in a CNN interview that the organization is seeking sponsorship from tech companies like Apple or Facebook or Google, explaining that adding technology will help make Nascar more relevant to a new generation of fans.
And the technology angle apparently isn't limited to only car sponsorships. In an awkward but fascinating demo at this year's CES keynote address, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs explained how an app created by Omnigon Communications would offer Nascar fans customized viewing across multiple smartphones, tablets, and TVs powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.
He brought Nascar driver Brad Keselowski on stage to help demo the new app, and if you can get past their awkward presentation in the video below, you can actually start to see they might be onto something here in terms of what I would call "real-time sports customization."
As for this coming Sunday's Daytona 500, the smart money would suggest Danica Patrick doesn't have good odds for pulling off a checkered flag, even with the pole position. She's a Sprint Cup rookie and has some formidable competition (including "co-poler" and three-time Daytona victor, Jeff Gordon).
But as Patrick herself said in interviews earlier this week, her gender ought not be the issue.
"I was brought up to be the fastest driver," Patrick explained, "not the fastest girl."
That being said, Nascar, and Madison Avenue, may very well be the ones most cheering Patrick on at the finish line for Daytona this weekend.
Because a victory by a female rookie in the sport's top annual competition might just be the thing that convinces a whole new generation of fans, both male and female, to pay more attention to Nascar throughout the rest of the year.
Very exciting. And up until that last lap, she was third, and at one point in the race led for a full lap and then some. That last lap just got ornery!
I think she earned the respect of the racing community, even though she admitted to some strategic errors in the last part of the race that may have prevented her from winning. I think she is on target to win in the future.
Good examples, Douglas. You and Todd have a vision of how it can connect to the interests of the NASCAR fans. I also think IBM's latest focus on mobile technology is another device with compatible markets.
I think the primary benefits businesses reap from a NASCAR sponsorship are brand recognition and product showcasing. As Todd referenced in the article, NASCAR has been aggressively penetrating into new markets and trying to shake their 'redneck' sitgma. Sprint's name is carried with each and every NASCAR Sprint Cup advertisement, News clip, and sports recap, reaching a growing viewing audience. NASCAR also provides a high profile way to showcase your products to consumers (and executives as Todd pointed out). The sport has highly complex data management requirements, spanning communications, data analysis, logistics, etc., all areas where a company like IBM would shine.
After reading your post on IBM's mobile portfolio, I envisioned IBM as the major sponsor for NASCAR. Sprint has reaped massive brand association benefits by branding NASCAR's communication network, showcasing in car communications during the race (listening in on spotters, providing in car chats at speed, etc.), providing realtime mobile race updates, and marquee branding of the "Sprint Cup." GoDaddy has leapt to the forefront repeatedly with Danica's marketability and recent Daytona pole position. I think NASCAR has been 'de-country-fied' enough to warrant another sponsorhip look from Big Blue.
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You only need take one quick glance around the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit at the Gaylord Opryland facility here in Nashville to recognize how busy the Smarter Commerce customer reference team has been these past few months in anticipation of the event.
In this morning's general session here at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville, our emcee Jay Baer said what I've been thinking for the past several days: We're in a giant terrarium.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
Apple may want to do a TV offering, but to meet its goal it would have to address three specific issues that have been exposed by earlier attempts to make Internet TV work.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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