Staying the Course: How NASCAR's Consumer Insights Team Navigated an Unprecedented Year

hi everyone it's two o'clock so we'll get started on our next presentation thank you so much for joining in on our second day of our october quarantine virtual insights conference my name is erica and i'm a senior project manager at accelerant i'll be introducing our next speaker but first of course our code conference ground rules just remember we're at the mercy of our technology here so if we do run into any technical difficulties stick with us and we'll get it back up and running as soon as we can be respectful to each other in the comments in the chat and to our presenters and please take this time to network and interact with each other you can connect using the qvic 2020 hashtag on linkedin and twitter and also please leave any questions you have for the presenter in the chat or the questions box we will have time for that at the end um and we'd love to get some of your questions answered for you so i'd like to introduce our next speaker bree craig she is the senior manager of consumer insights at nascar and she's going to be talking to us about staying the course in an unprecedented year so definitely some relevant content there hi bree thank you so much for joining us i will stop and let you take it over perfect and i will just share my screen really quickly all right how's that look everything good yes perfect perfect all right well hi everyone uh thanks so much for having me and thank you erica for that lovely introduction um as erica said my name is bree craig i work here at nascar i am senior manager of consumer insights and i have had the pleasure of working with nascar for three seasons now um obviously this kind of third season has looked completely different uh than than my previous two and so i'm really excited to just kind of um share with you guys how the internal research team here at nascar has really handled all of the you know kind of twists and turns this year has uh has thrown up at us so without further ado i'm going to start off with a video that the nascar production team put together which i feel like does a wonderful job of kind of summing up what happened this year really excited about what this is going to mean for our sport nascar unique really is our fan base plans and services that are part of our sport taylor hart jr waves the green flag the 62nd daytona 500 is underway here's the big one we are committed to our future and we're looking forward to seeing what lies ahead for all of us america seemed to wake up to the far-reaching threat of the coronavirus corona virus coveted 19th an unprecedented night in sports three of the four major sports leagues decided to suspend their seasons mlb opening day has now been pushed and then nascar postponing all races through may 3rd now a network television first a nascar all-star race from the virtual homestead miami speedway delivered by iracing here they come off the corner for the final time they all become together and the winner is hamline wow what a race what a finish yeah those fans should be cheering they saw a heck of a race that is incredible mike that's exciting after seven agonizing weeks nascar is back well that noise right there we've been waiting for we're racing today you believe it finally sports are back nascar the moment has arrived where drivers get to strap in fire up those engines and get back to what they do best side by side racing back to the line oh yeah boys thank you guys awesome job fans here in the stands it's good to see you again wow didn't see that coming i did not see that coming i don't even know what to say man never give up i want to thank everybody out there that kept things going while we've been trying to stay home stay safe really really proud of you thank you everybody all of nascar's drivers have rallied around bubble walls no one is white black brown or yellow they are all racers this is one of the most powerful memorable races and events i've ever experienced our support must feel better our country must do better the time is now to listen michael jordan announced he's starting a new nascar cup series team bubba wallace will be the driver did you our competitors and all our fans to join us in this mission all right i know i'm biased but like that gives me chills so everyone that is your quick i guess three minute um introduction into the world of nascar if you previously don't have any experience um it gets you fairly caught up to speed uh basically 2020 was set to be a historic year from the get-go just in terms of nascar changing leadership acquiring some tracks expanding our esports program and introducing gambling so the research team had our work cut out for us you know before 2020 even really happened um but obviously you know we had we had planned and prepared to run all these research projects based on kind of the things that were mentioned at the beginning of the video uh but when the world kind of ground to a halt we obviously had to had to change and adapt so that's you know why i'm here today is to um kind of show you some of the things that our team did uh how we provided value not only to our um executive team but internal and external stakeholders and i hope that you know some of the things that i show you today maybe you can go back and apply to your own business so i'm going to start with just probably the understatement of the century 2020 has been a wild ride i think we all know it um starting with of course the pandemic such as the world has never seen before right coronavirus and then we had kind of this cultural upheaval in terms of of social justice in a way that we haven't seen before this modern era of citizens coming together protesting in a very visible way and also expecting or even demanding businesses to become involved as well murder hornets um that was a thing just thought that i would throw that in there because uh you know we can't underestimate how how crazy and awful 2020 has been um also just so you all know this information i found out that they have a slaughter phase um so i thought that you guys should know apparently we're gonna be entering into that soon um you know but the joking aside uh apart from all of these changes and new things uh that have happened in 2020 uh some things have remained the same celebrities are refusing to give their children normal names uh as you can see by elon musk here i'm not even going to try i heard through the grapevine that apparently it's pronounced alex but anyway um and outside of that too nascar has continued racing that has been a constant throughout this entire year so what did we have to do in the face as a research team in the face of all this incredible change [Music] we had to pivot so like i said we had you know really our work cut out for us a very detailed and oriented plan for the type of research that we were going to conduct this year how are we going to provide value to like i said our external um and internal stakeholders as well as our executive team and that all just completely got blown away so the first thing we did was we took a step back and we thought about who needs support from the research team well number one the business does with all of our revenue streams halted you know we're not racing at the tracks fans aren't in the stands we're not broadcasting any sport support sports how can we help support the business well really the only thing we could do is start running scenarios all we could do is provide directional input for our executive team so that they're prepared for whatever 2020 throws at us next then the next group of people we have to provide sports uh support for our fans their world is upside down just like ours but one thing that we had to think about is that in their world sports and entertainment that's a luxury you know that's kind of where they go for an escape from their everyday lives uh and in 2020 with coronavirus the pandemic you know are they looking to hear more from us um or do they want us to back away and let them let them process um and if we do back away how can we still kind of stay top of mind so that way they don't go x amount of you know weeks without nascar and then decide that they just don't need us anymore and then lastly our sponsors uh you know so many professional sports um you know have sponsors but nascar is unique sponsors are one of the main pillars of our sports not only that but the fans love and expect and want to support our sponsors so how do we keep those sponsors invested when with us at a time where they're probably paring down themselves where they don't know what's happening um they're probably slashing budgets so how do we convince them that nascar is still a worthwhile investment even though we're not on the track right now so i'm going to share with you guys a very real slide um this was one of our directional slides that we had created in 2019 that had our business plan that we submitted for executives for the type of research that we were planning on executing and as you can see by that little glowing green edition at the top of the screen we just had to completely scrap everything and resubmit our plan um so basically again we just simplified as much as we could what are the kpis that we need to focus on you know that we can still help measure and and project um and those things are interest okay understanding the sentiment and and fan interest opportunities in the pandemic obviously before it was more about maintaining and growing but now we're really really honing in on on maintaining and then kind of secondarily if there's any opportunities for people bored at home in quarantine is there a chance that we can reach them attendance you know nascar halted their races um but we knew that wasn't going to be forever so with the scale of event that nascar puts on we immediately had to start researching and planning for when we go back to sports what is that going to look like what are what are consumers expecting um you know how much do they want to pay what's going to make them feel comfortable um you know and and obviously of course like how are we going to keep everyone safe engagement when we don't have an on track product how are we making sure that our fans don't forget about us and lastly partner value of course we couldn't do what we do without sponsors so how do we make sure that we're still a good investment for them how can we support them and how can we make sure that you know not only is nascar top of mind but all of our premier partners being top of mind for fans as well then we came up with our kind of main focus areas the first one obviously being understanding the pandemic um and what we really did is we leaned on third party research providers to to help us kind of figure out uh you know we're lucky enough at nascar to have a pretty built out research team internally but there was no way we were gonna be able to conduct um you know overall research that was gonna answer all of our executives questions so it turned to us to really look and see what was out there and gather that in a concise digestible way for our executives so that they were making informed decisions consumption and engagement we had to not only monitor what our fans were doing and how they were interacting with the sport but also plan to grow that and to make sure that you know everyone didn't just fall off because again we don't have anything on track awareness and interest we needed to understand how fans are coming back to sports um you know we need to know again like i said that kind of escapism luxury aspect is it something that they're craving now because they don't have access to it or is it something that's so far from their mind because they have such heavier matters going on that was we needed to identify where that line was and walk it very carefully and then lastly partner valuation and relationship insights of course i can't say it enough we need our partners and we needed to make sure that we were still being valuable and productive for them really quick this is just the timeline of some of the events that happened um you know from a research perspective this year so march 13th that was the day that all nascar staff got sent home i remember i was actually off that day and i had to come into the office to come get my stuff because i didn't know when we were going back we also had our first race postponed um and our research team normally conducts um a post race survey after every single event um and so there was already kind of immediate impacts on our cadence and what uh we are expected to provide to our stakeholders march 22nd is when we had our very first e-nascar iracing pro invitational series now this is huge um like you guys saw on kind of the sizzle video at the beginning nascar has already been working on an esports platform for several years now but only recently have they really started investing a lot of time a lot of money and starting to get visibility um we decided as a company that you know if we can't uh be on track and provide that entertainment for fans well why don't we go ahead and broadcast our esports product it's something that we have we can fill that air time we can fulfill our contracts with our broadcast partners we can still get our um premier sponsorship partners um you know face time with the fans if we provide that we had no idea how it was going to go but we knew it was a small thing that we could do to at least try may 17th nascar returns at darlington raceway this was huge we were one of the actually we were the first sport to return in the pandemic now we didn't return with fans for for darlington but we did get there relatively quickly and then june 10th nascar banning the confederate flag this was huge again with all of the um with with all of the events that happened throughout the country you know this summer uh nascar really felt as if it needed to do more and it needed to take a stronger stance and that's something historically that the company had never done but um you know with research and insights guiding the ship we finally took that step and it was amazing so i'm going to show you again another video i promised this whole thing isn't videos um but really quickly i'm going to show you some of the eye racing this is what ended up getting broadcast um so what you'll see is um we won't watch the whole video but it's gonna talk a little bit about our um iracing e-nascar irising pro invitational series and what it was was it already took the established athletes in our e-nascar program those that were uh racing virtually and then we added in our professional drivers that normally race on the track you know since they're not doing anything um during the quarantine we had them also come in and race along these you know these pro e nascar drivers and so this was something that we had never done before but uh but was really exciting because it kind of married those two audiences you know there's a huge audience for for sim racing and uh esports and video games in general there's a huge audience for nascar but traditionally there wasn't too much of an overlap there and so this was a really cool initiative that we did the first of its kind hey everyone i'm currently walking back to my apartment with some pancakes a little different race day today but excited for the i racing event i think it's going to be a lot of fun really excited to go eye racing here today at homestead a network television first a nascar all-star race from the virtual homestead miami speedway delivered by iracing i'm mike joy he's hall of famer jeff gordon we're practicing social distancing 35 of nascar's top drivers for 100 laps and out of retirement dale jr and bobby lovani can we call this a comeback for you maybe every cup car in a while it's sort of a comeback i guess we've got the pull the irishman pro series this is my racing eye racing everything racing debut online i can't believe the amount of attention and the anxiety that everybody's giving us we've all got a lot of laps there's no excuses at this point looking forward to getting going here crew chief in the day for the one and only chase elliot uh what do you think your odds are today poor very poor but i'm gonna try my best i can promise you from trying to get some experience on this thing all hours of the night and i think my wife is about to kill me i love you good luck we'll have fun today thank you drivers start your engines all right ready for the green green flag we're racing in homestead garrett smithley on the break from william byron [Music] all right come back down we're getting better all right and i'll pause it right there um if you guys would like to watch the rest of it on your own time it's available um on youtube e nascar pro invitational i racing series social mini dock it's about seven minutes long but basically the iracing program is something that's been around for for a long time it's an incredibly sophisticated and refined product basically it is simulation racing you need equipment to do it you need the the chair and the wheel and the pedals and usually multiple screens and then you purchase a subscription through iracing and the irishmen program is phenomenal because what they do is they go out to these tracks and they scan them so that every bump crack and crevice is represented in the in the in the virtual race um the cool thing about iracing there's lots of cool things but one of the cool things is that uh it's not just a nascar thing it's for all racing so if you are a big indycar fan and you always wanted to know what it would be like for some reason to race an indy car on uh you know at daytona motor speedway you can do that you could take a nascar cup race and race it on a formula one circuit um and then of course you can race a nascar cup um cup car on a nascar cup track um so a lot of race teams actually use iracing simulation rigs as practice for real races if it's a um if it's a track that the driver's never been to before or maybe they didn't get enough practice at they will oftentimes use iracing to get some extra practice lapse in um like i said but it's it's also available for just folks who want to who want a sim race and so there's a very large community of people who who enjoy sim racing and so um e-nascar is our is our esports program where we actually um work with our teams our our race teams and they draft these e-nascar athletes to race for the actual teams virtually um so it was super cool we already kind of had this product built out we didn't have anything to broadcast so we thought you know why not push it all together and and and really just kind of see what happens um so like i said uh iracing is an extremely sophisticated and refined product um so what were our results uh not so much sophisticated not so much refined um however very well received so uh just a couple highlights from uh this year's first kind of virtual season that was on broadcast um one of our top drivers denny hamlin his seven-year-old daughter accidentally turned off his rig mid-race um costing him the win uh mata benedetto one of our most charismatic drivers decided to race the entire race in a giraffe onesie and consequently overheated and then lastly alex bowman again one of our top series drivers felt the call of nature during the race had to get up and do what he had to do came back and his dogs were all over the rig so honestly it was just a fun social experiment for all of us um you know not only broadcasting it but i think fans really appreciated uh getting the chance to see what the drivers were doing during quarantine as well showing that everyone is struggling um but that we're doing our best to make it work and i think what was great too is that with all the research that we had already done on on iracing we knew how to talk about it to fans we knew that this wasn't a replacement for racing and we made sure it was very clear in our broadcast and all of our social posts that this is not a substitute we understand that it's different we understand that sometimes there's a glitch and it might look like a race car is flipping in the air repeatedly nine or ten times before stopping and landing on all four tires and continuing to drive we know that doesn't happen in real races we know that occasionally there's going to be glitches but let's just enjoy this at face value for what it is it is all of our drivers doing their best and having a great time [Music] so like i said this was incredibly well received it was the highest rated esports uh tv program of all time and you can see um we had multiple races at multiple tracks and all of them did wonderfully we reached 5.4 million unique viewers um we were number one in programming each week you have to remember that during this time all sports were stopped we were the only ones that had anything so really to be able to just kind of roll with what we already had was huge for nascar we got so much attention not only from fans but from media outlets as well not even just sports um but more traditional uh media outlets as well we're picking up on stories just because it was so unique and there was nothing else like it um one million new viewers and we also got younger viewers um so sometimes nascar's audience can aid can tend to be a little bit older than the average tv viewer and what we were seeing was that since this is something that's brand new hasn't been done before and it's esports we actually saw our broadcast viewership trending a little bit younger than what we're used to seeing they were also staying engaged for longer and again it just established us as the clear esports leader no one else was doing this and we kind of really set the bar for for how it should be done so just some quick numbers for you guys um this is just an example of our richmond event for television we had 971 thousand viewers turned in per minute um digital we had 1.2 million page views i think this was really helped out by the fact that of course there's recaps and and kind of race highlights but also the silly stuff uh the funny stuff the real life stuff of you know denny hamlin's daughter turning off his rig you know that's something that is is funny and endearing and and people like to see and then so many uh engagements on social media as well and what was unique about it uh was we were not only getting uh you know tweets and engagements from fans but our drivers while they were driving were also you know tweeting about their setups or bathroom breaks or like whatever else it was you know mata benedetto and his onesie they were also tweeting wall racing which is a completely different you know facet to racing that we don't get when they're actually in a physical car zooming around the racetrack and then here's some uh here's some research that we did uh on our nascar fan council this is our kind of proprietary research panel that we use it's it's made up of currently i think we are at over 11 000 avid fans who agree to give feedback to us out of the goodness of their own hearts they are not incentivized um they like to answer surveys every single week about uh the track in terms of it the on track product uh how the racing is whether or not it's exciting or boring um memorable or forgettable but also we uh do other types of research as well such as creative testing for our ad spots um maybe sometimes usability work for our you know nascar fantasy live product things like that and so um we of course asked our nascar fan council hey what did you guys think of this uh esports pro invitational um 93 of them were aware of it which is great because you know i think one of the biggest things we were concerned about was that everyone was just going to think that nascar is off air so we were going to kind of broadcast this just into the ether and not have any any eyes or ears but thankfully you know people were really aware of it and three out of five five avid fans watched um you know again we had to be so careful of not marketing this as a substitution uh you know our avid fans are so passionate and you know nascar is core to who they are um and they would get really offended if they thought that that's how we were thinking of it in terms of like oh the fans will like this racing is racing you know something's better than nothing like no we couldn't we could not talk about it as if it was a substitution we had to you know consciously repeatedly say like hey we all want to go back to racing but here's this really cool thing that you might like in the meantime uh favorability eight out of ten either loved or liked it which is um which is wonderful and there was also pretty high intent to uh to watch it again um which is which is great we're also worried that it would be kind of a a one-time thing of uh you know oh i've seen them race virtually once it's not anything like the real thing i don't need to tune in again but we were you know very thankful that as we continued um you know fans kept tuning in and so it really kind of held us over until we were able to um it really kind of held us over until we were able to get back to track which was our our ultimate goal so while you while erasing and or esports and i racing were on broadcast television what was the research team tasked with doing understanding everything else which which was a lot but but we knew it was coming and we knew that um it was great that we kind of had this placeholder but the ultimate goal like i said is getting not only the drivers back to the track but the fans back to the track so in order to figure out what we were doing we had to kind of answer some essential questions the first question of course is is time frame how long is this going to take you know where where are we projecting that we're going to be able to go back uh go back to the race um where are fans heads at are they going to think that it's irresponsible of us if if we return to racine are they interested in returning are they excited are we top of mind for them uh time how are fans spending their time if they're not dedicating you know our fans were lucky enough they appointment view our races pretty much every weekend so now they have all these extra hours in a week how are they spending that time are they watching more tv or less tv are they walking around outside and doing gardening or are they doubling down on netflix and hulu subscriptions we had to figure out where they were um emotionally as well so we had to make sure that we were striking the right balance between um being grave about the current situation obviously there's it's it's such a heavy subject matter um and we couldn't just act like everything was sunshine and rainbows and us going back to uh to racing but also we do know like i said before we are kind of that escapism route for uh you know their everyday stresses uh so how do we make sure that we are being authentic and sincere while walking that line and then lastly money we know a lot of our fans got laid off during this pandemic um we also knew that you know maybe our fans aren't laid off right now but maybe they're pinching pennies in anticipation of it um the market was going crazy no one knew how long it was gonna last so we also didn't know you know how much money our fans had to spend again like i said uh sports is you know for better for worse it's it's a luxury uh it's it's not a necessity and it's something that you know our our fans could really drop if they were having a hard time and so we were really hoping to to make sure that wherever possible fans were still including us you know just in their normal lives so one of the things that we did uh to help support our um you know executive team during this time especially to answer that first question is we created a calendar and you guys might be thinking like bree this isn't research it's not but it's something that the research team could do to help navigate the ship to help provide direction and support so what we did is we spent hours scouring the internet finding rumors and posts from other leagues trying to figure out where their heads were at when are they going to return to sports and what we found out was that actually nascar was poised to return back sooner than anyone else so what we did was we created a super simple easy visual calendar for our leadership team they could click on any any of the events that were listed in the calendar and be linked back to whatever the original article or blog post or whatever was but they could see at a glance kind of where we were competing for viewers and you might notice here that uh well you know brie i thought you said that nascar was was first back and i see ufc well actually ufc got cancelled so so we truly were which was which was wonderful and also we knew that in terms of all the other sports we were the best suited for returning first um you know obviously all of our venues are outdoor they're open air um there's there's race teams but it's more of an individual sport obviously our drivers are wearing full fire suits with gloves and you know full head helmets and they're each in their individual cars so we are really really set up well to make sure that we can have a product that is completely safe and and social distance and complying with you know all all of the rules and regulations um so once we returned to sports we actually returned on the 17th with darlington we didn't have any fans and as you can see there wasn't really any competition you can also look and see that there are races on wednesday that was something new that nascar decided to do we wanted to make sure because of our our partners are so important to us we wanted to make sure that we got our full season in so instead of um skipping or cutting some some races we decided that we were gonna condense our schedule and run double headers and again this is something that we conducted research on with our fans to ask if they would be interested we had historic research that suggested that fans would be interested in um weekday evening races and then we were able to ask again and find out that during the pandemic they were even more um interested in this type of thing and it was great because we were able to make that decision and pitch it to our broadcast partners with confidence of if we put this product online or um on air we will get eyeballs it will happen um so this is kind of the like i said the schedule for may you can see how uncluttered it was and how little kind of competition we had then here's june you can start to see it now um still nascar is the most frequent uh really kind of the only other uh major competitor that we have at this point in time at this point time was golf um again because it was much easier for them to social distance and return without fans and then here's the just the last month that i included in the deck just for you guys to see um you can see kind of all of the clutter that is now on this calendar and this is where we truly had to start fighting uh for for views in terms of um other sports opening days everyone else making up events and things like that so we actually by starting early we're able to really reach not only our core audience but new people who maybe hadn't engaged with nascar before but were starved for sports they were able to turn on the tv and and watch a live nascar race um because that's you know the only live uh sporting event that's on television and so it was so important and we got so much out of it by being the first kind of back to racing or you know back to sporting events something else we did and i can't um can't state this enough is we really leaned on third party research providers you know the even though we have the fan council to conduct research on we needed to be sensitive we couldn't be pinging them every other day with different questions about hey when are you going to spend money on us again hey when do you think you're going to go on vacation again hey are you just sitting around watching tv now like those are questions that we can't ask our fans and it would be tactless to do so um so what we did and again probably one of the easiest but also most valuable services that we provided to our executive team was that we found and condensed all of the information that was already online into a quick digestible weekly report for our executive team of this is what we know about coronavirus this week you know um and so it was incredibly helpful because i think sometimes we take it for granted as researchers that we're able to look at an article and be and easily make the call on whether or not it's something that we'd feel comfortable citing um you know we can look and see oh you know that sample size is way too small or pull up the footnote and be like wow that was a really biased way for them to ask that question of course they got those results um and so rather than kind of leaving it up to um the executive team just to kind of sift through all that noise and clutter we went ahead and did it for them and it was incredibly valuable even though we weren't able to conduct our own research at that time we were still providing them with fresh relevant insights so again this is something i highly recommend you guys to not take for for granted if you ever feel like oh we don't have the time or the budget to do all of this kind of exorbitant custom research it doesn't have to be that even just going through what's already available is is incredibly helpful and also even in the long run in terms of getting names and faces in front of the executive team if you do want to pitch maybe more intensive research down the road they could say oh yes i remember that company i remember you know seeing their logo and those insights decks that you guys provided um so here really quickly you can just see a quick grab of um the type of insight that we reported again it's not something that we did ourselves but something that we were able to to provide um as value for our executive team and you can see um how much have you missed each of the following as a result of lifestyle disruptions well it's great because not only is sports in there everything else is in there so it gives our executive team a lot more context than if we had just run a sports-centric actually nascar-centric uh survey on the fan council this is much more gen pop broader more applicable here's another slide again it's a little bit ugly because we just grabbed everyone's information as it was um you know obviously it's presented in a pdf format so we can't really change it to look all beautiful and on our color schemes but again super helpful this was kind of after the initial um the first initial wave of fear died down and people were starting to feel optimistic again now obviously since this time there's been several different kind of waves of optimism and fear that have happened but we were able to kind of show over time how our consumers were feeling and how the general public was feeling in terms of of timing when it would be right to start going back to track and when we could even begin to think about inviting fans and having some sort of like limited experience for for fans of track and then here too this is again uh research that was more towards the end of of you know right before we got fans back in the stands and you can see um we have a little graph over on the side by performance research and then on the right we have um we're finally able to do the research on our fan council panel it finally made sense we were able to do it and so we were able to kind of provide uh fan council results alongside gen pop results from other other research companies to really provide additional context and what we found was that um nascar fans were more willing to go back to races and were more eager to return to kind of normal life than than regular uh than just gen pop which is very encouraging for us and kind of the last topic that i wanted to talk about um is social justice uh this is you know a topic that has rocked every corner of every industry this year um and i think it was a truly just historic moment for nascar uh in terms of us actually you know taking a public stance again that's not something that in the past you know companies were expected to do and i think especially nascar even less so just given its its um probably very southern very conservative roots um to be frank and so for nascar to come out as a you know leader in this in this movement was not only huge and wonderful but also terrifying and it never would have happened if we didn't have research and insights to kind of support everything and so um as some of you guys might be aware we have a african-american driver in the top series there's only one his name is bubba wallace he races um he races cup series at this time he raced the number 43 car for richard petty motorsports which is a pretty um iconic car a very strong strong link to nascar history and heritage and you know bubba has never had never previously really been an advocate for social justice he was really just focused on his career just really grinding trying to to make his way to the top and uh you know the events of the summer really just struck him differently and he decided that he was was going to advocate and basically what happened was he got he came under so much fire he got so much pushback um like i said again uh nascar historically has been um you know a little bit more conservative so to all of a sudden have a driver at the top level um you know advocating for social change was huge and basically nascar took a look at the situation we knew what was right they came to uh the research and analytics department and said all right we're gonna do this what's what's the damage gonna be they already knew that they were gonna do it but they needed to understand what was going to happen and so basically to the best of our abilities we kind of projected what was what was going to happen but also we were able to say like you know there there might be some of our fans that we lose there are going to be people that don't you know love this but uh it is going to be better for the sport in in the long run and and again like i said nascar already knew it was the right thing to do they were going to do it no matter what the research team had to say but we were at least able to provide that kind of extra reassurance to help them kind of weather the the storm that they knew was going to happen and so um sure enough bubba had been doing some interviews and he made a public call for nascar to ban the confederate flag and then two days later nascar made it official and they announced that they would be banning the confederate flag at all events from here on out so as soon as that happened again we're kicking it into high gear and and doing some more um doing some more research so this again was more gen pop um so not on the fan console not you know anything else like that and so what we found was you know over half of the general population had a negative association with the flag half of them felt uncomfortable and embarrassed by it um 76 of the general population was aware that nascar made the decision to prohibit the flag i mean that's that's huge um and 62 percent were in support of it and 64 felt good about nascar due to the decision and again these numbers aren't astronomically high but it's something that we needed to do we knew that the majority of people would agree with us because again it is the right thing to do but also we knew it would help combat some of the more negative stereotypes associated with nascar because we know we're not that company but new fans might you know our potential fans might turn away from us just because they because of previous conceptions about our sport um so to be able to have these numbers was incredibly positive and reassuring so here's kind of some of the global reaction that nascar experienced and this slide is courtesy of our social analytics team who really just again i probably didn't see them for a couple weeks they just had their heads down and were so busy um you know tracking everything that was happening to nascar um but basically we had 94 000 social mentions 291 million impressions over 80 000 unique authors um so many retweets and what was amazing is we're not only getting kind of retweets and and earned media from folks in the auto racing world we you know it also started expanding into other sports and then it went even further than that into like general general public like there's a great example is reese witherspoon tweeting about nascar you know that's not something at the beginning of 2020 that we would expect um and so it was truly phenomenal and it fostered a lot of conversations about nascar it really elevated um bubba wallace's career in terms of his his visibility i think a piece was just published that he's one of the most recognized drivers in nascar if not the most recognized driver in nascar currently and what we saw too was a lot of a lot of other black athletes in different leagues reached out to bubba to not only offer their support but to also ask him questions about nascar and we kind of saw this really cool phenomena of these other athletes that aren't you know um that aren't playing their sport right now live tweeting during our events asking the nascar fan base questions so that they could better understand the sport and having our you know older avid fans tweet back at them and respond and help explain the uh explain the the format and kind of bring them into the fold and so it was it was truly phenomenal and like i said i mean anytime a company takes a stance like that it's pretty scary you know i think it was especially scary for nascar um just given given their roots but it was the right thing to do and and so so worth it and just such um such positive response um and then kind of lastly uh the most recent news that that you guys might have heard about is bubba wallace like i mentioned for 2020 he's driving the 43 with richard petty motorsports um actually announced that he is uh switching cars and so it was announced that michael jordan and emily denny hamlin bought a charter to race a car in the 2021 season as co-owners and they're going to have bubba wallace be the driver so absolutely phenomenal marrying multiple sports fandoms together introducing a whole new set of people to you know the world of nascar and then also uh wasn't announced at the time of this slide being created but they just recently announced that not only will bubba wallace be driving for michael jordan but the car number is actually of course going to be 23. um so just so cool all around incredibly exciting a really wonderful example of um you know kind of the the pain of social reckoning uh being taken and turned into something wonderful and awesome and progressive for our sport so i know that you know even though 2020 isn't over yet um 2021 we already have our work cut out for us and we are so so excited um to see how nascar you know continues to to grow and and tackle whatever situations uh are thrown at us um so with that i'll turn it back over to erica and maybe see if there's any questions thank you bri that was so interesting it's really i mean obviously all companies are dealing with so many issues um amid the pandemic but really interesting to see this breakdown of how nascar is like pivoted and and really focus their business on on becoming better during this time so that's great um we don't have any questions anyone has any last minute ones pop em in it's been a quiet question day i think everyone's feeling the friday friday mood no all right oh nice great presentation from nancy thank you all right well we will give you oh wait one question you mentioned social listening what types of tools do you utilize overall for your research that's a great question um hopefully i don't get myself into too much trouble because i'm not on the social analytics team um i believe that our main partners are uh meltwater and zoomth right now um and we're actually working to make sure that our social listening tools are kind of consistent across all of our our um all of our different departments so uh before when i first got to nascar there was uh you know kind of our digital team and our social team and everyone was kind of using their um using their own tools and so now that's kind of been one of the big efforts that was uh kind of in place before 2021 got turned upside down was was making sure that we were all kind of on the same page in terms of our social listening tools but uh zoom and melt water are the main ones that we use gotcha any last minute questions going once see if any come in all right i think we're safe thank you so much bri that was a great presentation thanks so much for taking the time and joining us for the conference yeah of course thanks for having me and everyone else we'll have our last