MP: They’re feeling seen by something much bigger than themselves that they’re hugely passionate about. That’s a rarity, and it’s very generous in how it realizes the fan community’s dreams of being recognized.
DO: Exactly. It humanizes the brand. That’s what we try to do with our collaborations. Every once in a while, we’ll get a fan who does a cool shoot, or a video or something, and we’ll just collab with them. They can’t believe it. And then also, in our live chats, when people are coming in and saying, “This is my first time here,” we make sure that we tag those people and say, “Hey, welcome to your first race, we’re so glad you’re here.” They respond and say, “No way. IMSA just tagged me!”
MP: NASCAR and IndyCar are series that are much older than IMSA and they have incredibly popular drivers with six-figure, if not seven-figure followings on every social platform. The cars are cool, but they are personality-driven series where fans flock to and rally around the drivers online.
This isn’t so much the case for IMSA and its digital presence. We know that your cars, while they don’t all have their own social accounts, seem to be the things that generate big numbers. You see it with AO Racing’s Rexy, Roxy and Spike, for example. The Cadillac V-Series.R GTP car doesn’t have its own social account, but you post a photo or video of that thing moving, and folks just collapse onto it with support.
Can you speak to that side of not necessarily having the driver notoriety to blow things up like some other series, but maybe where the cars and the racing and the community make up for it? There’s clearly something non-traditional that’s working.
DO: I think there’s a couple of layers to that unique aspect. When I was at the Spurs, we had the same problem, and I don’t think people know that, in the sense that you had Tim Duncan, who was one of the NBA’s most popular players. But Tim Duncan was also extremely humble and reserved. He had no social media accounts. We had Kawhi Leonard, who was an incredible talent, but again, no social media accounts. We had Tony Parker, who at the time, did not have many followers. He may have had a Facebook account and maybe an Instagram account, but he wasn’t using them very much. Manu Ginobili, same thing.
We had this weird situation with a team that was super humble, team-first, and had an incredible fan base. Because we had five championships, we’d sell out every night. The Spurs had a winning record for 20 years, so the team’s popularity was huge. However, nobody could reach the players because they weren’t on social media.
What we had to do with the Spurs, which I think is why we’re so agile here at IMSA today, is run with a team-first content strategy. In other words, for most teams, their digital cheat code is, “Oh, we’ll just post our star player every time, and we’ll crush it.” Which works.
We had to balance it out, and that was the culture of the organization. If we posted Tim Duncan, we had to post a rookie after him, and we had to balance the content around every single player on the team evenly. In doing that, we started to elevate the players that were less known while also leveraging our stars. Team-first and equal exposure was our differentiator in the league.
So when it comes to IMSA, I think you hit it on the head, where the cars are the stars. But we haven’t quite figured it out yet with our athletes because we have hundreds and hundreds of drivers. I think that’s our biggest challenge.
We don’t have the same drivers in the same cars every weekend. Getting to know them over time as you would in NASCAR, IndyCar, or Formula 1 is harder because here’s so much change and fluctuation in the sport, but I think that going through the cars lets us use the manufacturers as the anchor.
So, if it’s Corvette, let’s go with the car and we have a series called ‘Meet Your Drivers.’ If you’re a Corvette fan, these are your new favorite drivers. You back into it that way, and then you repeat that across the manufacturers as deep as you can go, within the bandwidth that you have. That’s an approach that we want to start trying.
MP: A phenomenon we didn’t know to expect, but fans are so thankful to receive in the sport, is AO Racing, with a bunch of Jurassic-themed race cars that now have Hot Wheels counterparts that folks are clamoring to find at their Targets and Walmarts.
That team is a lot of fun, and it must be something you’re thankful for and hope you can replicate. How do you bottle this and use it to help grow and improve what other teams might do in a similar vein in IMSA?
DO: I recently posted on LinkedIn about AO Racing’s success. It’s branding 101 but also a masterclass, which is what we’re trying to do at IMSA with our own brand. It’s established, but it needs a personality. The logo is known, but what does it make you feel when you see it?
What AO Racing has done is they’ve given their race cars personalities. The draw there is to be emotionally invested in something, you’ve got to give fans a reason to care.
It’s not just some car in the race. You’ve seen it yourself. When Rexy comes around on the track, fans stop and say, “There he goes.” They’re looking for that particular car, and the kids are pointing it out. All of that is a base ingredient for acquiring sponsorships, right? You’ve got a crowd-pleaser on your hands. Every-body’s eyeballs are on it. That’s how you build brand equity.
If you take a brand and you think about its logo, that’s what a lot of people think ‘brand’ is. It’s a logo. But it’s not the logo. It’s the feeling that a person gets when they see your logo. That’s the brand equity.
And it’s built over time. It’s developed at each touch point that somebody has with that particular brand and it’s dictated by the fans, not by the brand. So, every time somebody sees Rexy or the inflatable T-Rex mascot at the race, or a sticker, or a plushy, or whatever, it gives them a feeling of fun every time, and it’s reinforced every time they see it.
And you don’t see anybody around AO Racing going, “Oh, that car sucks.” Never, right? Everything, every interaction, every touch point, is super positive, super fun, and people just want more of that. And the little touches that they do, they don’t just stop with the livery. It’s the Porsche GT3 ‘RAWR’. And the gold teeth? Another level of genius. They’ve got all these touches that are little easter eggs. I think that AO does that really well.