Motorsports is having a moment. Whether it is NASCAR, Formula One or other types of racing, the sport is drawing audiences and sponsorships.
Spire Motorsports wants to leverage that attention by not staying in its lane, says Todd Mackin. The NASCAR racing team is thought of as both a motorsports competitor and a content team for its sponsors, says Mackin, president of parent Spire Holdings.
“We are going to bring you eyeballs through different avenues,” he says.
Spire Holdings launched Motorsports during the 2019 racing season, after it acquired the charter of Furniture Row Racing, a defunct Denver-based racing team. It now fields three cars in NASCAR competitions and works with sponsors including Chili’s Grill & Bar, Ziegler Auto Group, and insurer Group 1001.
The motorsports segment is expected to grow by nearly 8% every year for the next decade, to $6.93 billion this year. Sponsorships and brand partnerships are fueling much of the growth, but rising broadcasting and streaming revenues and new events are also feeding the expansion.
Spire Motorsports has grown by taking a broad view of marketing partnerships and creating a bespoke relationship, “not a cookie-cutter thing,” says Mackin. The team learns the partner company’s business and creates an integrated effort, he explains. For example, he notes how when Group 1001’s Gainbridge subsidiary signed up as a sponsor “I don’t know that half our road crew knew what an annuity is,” but the entire company sat down with Gainbridge management and learned.
“That was important for us because people would walk up to them in the garage and be like: ‘What’s Gainbridge?’ And I want them to be educated enough to speak to it,” he says. “We want to be a third arm of their marketing department.”
“There is no offseason”
Spire tries to create sponsorships that go beyond traditional practices. Motorsports marketing is still focused on one race in one market for one weekend, but the world of racing has changed, says Mackin. Marketers want new ways to engage fans beyond putting a brand logo on a car or on the driver’s fire suit, he explains.
Spire Motorsports has diversified how it works with sponsors and marketing partners, whether it’s by taking racecar drivers to hockey games to meet the fans, or building entire branding efforts, including digital and social media. Thanks to the diversified base at Spire Sports + Entertainment, the racing team can vertically integrate marketing efforts and create complete sponsorship packages.
“We took the approach of: Okay, we can put your sticker on the car, but what else can we do for you?” says Mackin. “What we wanted to do is say: ‘Yes, you get this race in this market for this weekend, but we want to win the race before it even starts.’ You are our partner for the year. We are going to work on things that continue to elevate your brand even when you are not on the racetrack.”
Spire Sports + Entertainment had a long-standing practice as a sports marketing agency, “the Jerry Maguire of the motorsports world,” said Mackin. In 2018, looking to “control our own destiny,” management purchased the Furniture Row charter and the Rapid City Rush, a South Dakota-based affiliate of the NHL’s Calgary Flames. (That side of the business evolved into Spire Hockey, owner of four minor-league teams.)
Mackin joined a small, entrepreneurial staff at that time “as the only one who understood hockey,” but also the only member of management with no experience in motor sports. That might have actually helped him see things differently, he says.
“My mindset was a little bit different on how we can get our team to the next level,” says Mackin.
Motorsports has an “old-school mentality” that remains centered on linear TV broadcasts and what happens on the racetrack. Spire has broken with that, creating integrated efforts like a recent campaign for Chili’s and its Presidente Margarita cocktail. At Talladega SuperSpeedway, Spire launched a “Ride the ‘Dente” activation that included meet-and-greets with the drivers, a country music video featuring its drivers, distinctive fire suits and more.
“It was really, really a full-throttle moment,” says Mackin. The effort is short-listed as a finalist for a Sports Business Daily Sammy Award for the Sales Advertising Marketing Management Idea of the Year.
It’s a long way from when Mackin joined Spire three years ago. “There was like, six of us, running around like crazy trying to get two cars on the track with stickers on them. Now, we’ve built it for 35-40 people that go out there to try to win every race and win every day,” he says.
Hockey and F1 crossovers
Spire Motorsports ‘relationships through its Spire siblings have been helpful in building out sponsorship muscle. “We’ve been able to cross-promote and cross-align a lot of different brands,” he says.
Since the hockey season doesn’t overlap with the racing season, it lets the Spire take advantage of the down times. Spire holds NASCAR nights at its team home stadiums in Athens, Georgia and Greenville, S.C.. with NASCAR stars—such as Kyle Busch, Daniel Suarez, Carson Hocevar, and Ross Chastain—along with a racecar wrapped in team colors and other opportunities for marketing partners. The most recent one in January sold out a 6,000-seat facility in Athens, Ga.
This synergy works, because the fandoms for both sports have a significant overlap, says Mackin.
“There is no offseason,” he says. “You’re able to have that full 12-month cycle of being able to put your partners in the right light.”
Even though Spire is all-in on NASCAR, Mackin doesn’t rule out working with Formula 1. It recently signed a partnership with TWG Motorsports, which oversees major F1 teams such as Andretti Global and the new Cadillac F1 team.
“It is going to become, hopefully, the elite motorsports family across all different series, and we are so excited to be a part of that,” says Mackin. This opens opportunities for combining NASCAR and F1 activations, when it makes sense, he says. For example, Mackin notes that last year, Chili’s participated in the Daytona 500 race with Spire and the Indy 500 with the Andretti team.
“The hope is that there’s so much synergy across these properties that when someone, a brand, comes in and they’re like: ‘I want to get into motorsports,’ we can say: ‘Cool. Here’s the catalog,’” says Mackin. “If they win, we win. If we win, they win. We try to think of it that way.”
