NASCAR TEAMS WITH SNAPCHAT
Four races to be highlighted on Live Stories
DAYTONA BEACH, FLA. NASCAR will double its presence in Snapchat’s Live Stories feature this year by partnering with the social media platform to highlight at least four races.
Live Stories is a collection of user-submitted snaps revolving around a single event or location, and each gets millions of views during the 24 hours they’re visible. And Snapchat’s demographic, primarily young people, is exactly what NASCAR is going for now.
“The traditional channels are very important, and we’re never going to go away from that. But if we want to get younger and more diverse, we have to share this type of content and do it where they are,” said Jill Gregory, NASCAR senior vice president of marketing and industry services. “We can’t always expect the fans to find us. We have to push our content proactively out to them. So by partnering with someone like Snapchat, that’s our way of putting NASCAR content in front of more people.”
Gregory told USA TODAY Sports the partnership would kick off with the Daytona 500 and expand to three to-be-determined races. Last year, NASCAR had Snapchat Live Stories at the Daytona 500 and the Talladega Superspeedway race in May.
Snapchat doesn’t release statistics, but the stories — which will include things such as tailgating, behind-the-scenes glimpses of the drivers and fan-submitted race footage from the stands — are eagerly gobbled up by millions of users.
During the Talladega race last year, Fox Sports reporter Alan Cavanna tweeted a screenshot of one of his snaps that got picked up by Live Stories. It was viewed 7.8 million times, which was more viewers than tuned in for the race itself — and Snapchat has grown since then.
NASCAR cited data showing the social media app had more than 100 million daily users.
“If (Live Stories) generate interest in seeing more of NASCAR, that’s the ultimate goal,” Gregory said. “It’s a ton of users and fans we want to get NASCAR in front of. It’s fantastic for us, and we’re looking forward to making it bigger and better in 2016.”
Snapchat and NASCAR will work together on developing special filters for the Daytona 500. Much like the Snapchat stories for NFL playoff games, there will be overlays in the form of interesting Daytona 500 facts to help educate users who might not be NASCAR fans. And fans at Daytona should have more of an opportunity to post than before; the track’s renovation project enhanced Wi-Fi capacity.
The Snapchat partnership is part of a bigger social media push from NASCAR, which is taking a digital-first approach to its marketing this year.
NASCAR said it generated 4.1 billion social impressions across all platforms in 2015, a 52% increase over the previous year.