MP: Most racing series have a bunch of official sponsors and partners that get promoted in print and on the broadcasts. Very traditional. Where are we headed with digital sponsorships?
F1 is a monster of its own in the digital space, so I don’t look at is as being representative of reality for the rest of racing, but do you think digital growth has come far enough to where a series like IMSA or others here could look for the same kind of serious marketing partnerships, but on digital platforms?
DO: We have a variety digital products that are plug-and-play activations for brands, partners, manufacturers. Or even new businesses that haven’t historically sponsored motorsports, like fitness or nutrition, because our drivers are endurance athletes. IMSA is a marketing platform for automotive and technology companies – and we should be looked at as an authentic activation opportunity beyond advertising. We’re now connecting directly to fans in ways that are quantifiable, and digital is where our partnerships team is allocating more of their time. It’s constantly increasing.
MP: Growth on YouTube is a strategy that you and the executive team have pushed for. It’s home to original content that IMSA produces, and it’s become a huge a vehicle for live coverage during race weekends. Talk about IMSA’s YouTube growth and what has helped the channel take off with subscribers. The metrics suggest you’re using YouTube to set the tone, at least in the U.S., for how a racing series can use that platform to connect with a larger and younger audience.
DO: It really starts with a layered content strategy. Not to use too much jargon, but I think that in 2023, Michelin’s Win the Weekend brought a lot of new attention to the channel, and that was the initial catalyst that brought people in to discover IMSA — this new type of content, this new series.
Then, when I arrived, we had the opportunity to reorganize the channel a little bit and emphasize our series by using playlists and organizing it so that we could prepare to build it into the channel that it is now.
The next ingredient was the archived races that we had that were already posted there — pulling them to the forefront and resurfacing them by doing little organic posts — ‘remember when’-types of things on social media.
When we started our behind-the-scenes videos at Indy in 2023, that was the third layer, where we started developing organic content in a totally new way with partners like CoForce that started to have this drip effect on the channel.
That’s really what you need to keep people engaged and coming back for more and clicking on the subscribe button. So we had Win the Weekend and a lot of older races on the channel, helping to bring people in.
Going into 2024, we had an opportunity internationally because we didn’t have rights restrictions internationally. That was a wide open space for us, and when we streamed our first live international coverage on YouTube at Sebring, just as an experiment, we had over 500,000 live views and we saw an instant influx of new people, a lot of people coming into the chat asking, “What am I watching? This is amazing. I’ve never seen this before.” Other people in the chat stepped right up to answer their questions. We even made a couple of people moderators on the spot because we couldn’t keep up.
We knew that we had that thirst, or that pent-up demand, where we were providing something that people were seeking. We started with just the WeatherTech Championship race at Sebring, and ended up across the year doing all of our single-make series live on YouTube, as well as our Historic Sportscar Rac-ing series, totaling nearly 60 livestreams in 2024.
Everything is now included, and that content volume has been the groundswell, or the impetus for our growth on YouTube. It was all initially organic, Going back to the original metrics, we doubled our channel’s watch time in 2023 only to double it again in 2024.
MP: Embracing YouTube has been a really effective strategy. There are other series that use YouTube in the same way — Australian Supercars is a great example — but domestically, IMSA is the only big series I can think of that’s made YouTube a central part of its digital strategy with each new race. I assume this strategy is working the way you hoped?
DO: Yes. Around 70 percent of our subscribers are under the age of 44, which is exactly what we want. We’ve also seen growth internationally from the countries you’d expect: Germany, Japan, France, the UK, Spain, and Brazil. So being able to expand our audience and make inroads in totally new places may eventually open up new opportunities for sponsorships and other partnerships that help IMSA stay on this exciting growth trajectory. The entire team is very excited about 2025.