 | | Home Depot spun an ad for ladders off Tony Stewart's climb to the flag stand at Daytona. Credit: Autostock |
By Ron Lemasters Jr., Special to NASCAR.COM
July 27, 2005
01:08 PM EDT (17:08 GMT)
When Tony Stewart won the Pepsi 400 on July 2 at Daytona, he climbed the fence to celebrate his triumph with the fans. Out of the car, up the fence and to the flag stand he climbed, becoming the first to make it that far in recorded history. He did it again at New Hampshire, and in the process gave his primary sponsor, The Home Depot, a hook to for a national advertising campaign. "Hey Tony, we've got ladders," and the ad showed Stewart in mid-climb up the fence at Daytona. Home Depot used it to promote a national weekend sale on ladders and fencing. If you wanted to buy a ladder or some fencing products during the Pocono weekend, here was your chance to save 10 percent off the purchase price. What a great idea. The fact that so much had been made of Stewart's unique celebration helped Home Depot pull the trigger on the campaign, and had he won at Pocono, you can bet the sale would have been extended. In fact, Home Depot associates presented Stewart with a ladder during his Sunday morning hospitality appearance at Pocono. Had he won, that ladder just might have made an appearance on the front straightaway -- to assist Stewart in scaling Pocono's formidable fence. The process that Home Depot used to both set the sale and take advantage of Stewart's unique celebration is one that companies involved with motorsports do not make the most of, in my opinion. Ads celebrating victories are accepted practice in the motorsports world. You see them in USA Today, congratulating drivers for winning. How often do you see something like Home Depot did? As corporate sponsors assume more and more power in today's NASCAR world, the precedent Home Depot has set should serve as a "how to" moment for other sponsors. Of course, Home Depot is a national chain, and they do sell ladders, so the situation was tailor-made for their marketing and public relations departments to implement. Retailers have the advantage over other sponsors. Can you imagine Pfizer's Viagra brand offering a 10-percent-off coupon for a Mark Martin victory?  |  | ALSO | |
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In short-track racing, these sorts of promotions -- Home Depot's, not Viagra's -- are fairly common. The sponsors are more local, so it's easy for the pizza parlor that sponsors a car to have a program for free or discounted pizza every time its car wins. It's much tougher to do on a national scale, but it can be done. At the national and multi-national level, however, more are layers involved. Those who pay attention to the sponsorship at the corporate level are usually plugged in enough to start something like this rolling, but there's not much time and corporations have a bureaucracy that has to be serviced. Home Depot's move to capitalize on its fence-climbing driver's victories is a breath of fresh air in what has turned into a fairly regimented process. Usually, win ads are created before the season starts, their space reserved but with the proviso that if the driver doesn't win, the ad is pulled back and slipped back into line at the next race. Once the driver wins, it's a matter of getting the proper artwork into a mechanical and doctoring the language to fit the event. Pretty simple, really. Campaigns like Home Depot's are more spontaneous, and they require plenty of work from creative folks to have them prepared in time for deadlines. Other companies could make more use of their drivers' heroics on the track this season. The National Guard could use Greg Biffle's five wins as a recruiting tool. Jeff Gordon's Daytona 500 title alone this year could have made DuPont even more money, and after Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s Chicagoland triumph, there might have been a Bud in every fridge from coast to coast. As we've said in this space: It's all about moving product, right? There are 75 million NASCAR fans, so having your message get to just 10 percent of them makes it a large market segment all of itself. There are other tie-ins for Stewart, who has said he's thinking about strapping a mattress to his back next time he climbs, just in case. Hello, Serta? Are you paying attention, Simmons? I'm sure Home Depot could come up with a scissor lift or something like it. Should Stewart win next week at the Brickyard 400, he might need one; that Indy fence is serious business. | 
