That's Bristol Racin'

ABC news story, Rudd saga ends, Daily Scene news items, and the Sharpie 500 from Bristol Motor Speedway.

ABC Network Exposure ...........

I have no idea what the ABC network was up to with its segment on ABC World News Tonight concerning advertising in NASCAR. The ABC network owns the ESPN networks which were left out in the cold with the big NASCAR broadcasting contract that was consummated a couple of years ago with FOX and NBC. On top of that, the ABC network used to broadcast a couple or races a year on its own.

The August 20th broadcast depicted the Winston Cup racecars as "flying billboards." I thought that some of the facts that the ABC news team dug up were interesting. The story claimed that over 10 million people viewed NASCAR races annually, although I perceive that figure to be much higher.

Some of the advertising figures that were released were quite astonishing. They claim that the NASCAR Winston Cup racing industry is responsible for over 4 billion dollars of advertising revenue annually. Corporations that sponsor racecars are seeing a five to seven dollar return for each advertising dollar spent. They interviewed Jimmy Johnson, rookie driver of the No. 48 Lowe's Chevrolet owned by Hendrick/Gordon Motorsports, who stated that the Winston Cup race driver these days was basically no more than a polished highly paid spokesman for the sponsor. (That's the main reason why Home Depot and Joe Gibbs Racing were ready to fire Tony Stewart because of his outburst and physical assault of Photographer Gary Mook.) They went on to state that Lowe's figures to have already gotten over 54 million dollars in "free" advertising as of the August Michigan race just by the logo on the No. 48 as it's seen circumventing the racetrack by race attendees and the TV audience. These figures were reached due to studies made by the independent observations of a company that measures how many seconds/minutes each racecar is seen by the TV audience during each Winston Cup race broadcast.

One fact that the ABC News story failed to bring out was that those high figures of advertising returns don't necessarily cover all of the Winston Cup racecars and sponsors. They were just referring to the top echelon of racecars and drivers. Some of the lesser sponsorships on racecars that aren't consistently in the top ten or fifteen will probably be luck to see half of the five to seven dollar return on their advertising dollars. There are 43 cars out on the racetrack during any given race, and they can't all be at the top of the charts.

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