Hollywood has produced its share of cheesy, stereotypical racecar movies over the years. But beyond an occasional film like Days of Thunder, movie studios mostly ignored NASCAR as a larger vehicle for marketing their blockbusters.
Now Hollywood has come to realize what the rest of corporate America figured out long ago. NASCAR fans, unlike those in baseball, the NFL and the rest, embrace the hard sell of a sport that features a never-ending commercial loop each Sunday.
If NASCAR can sell Fords and Chevys that way, it can sell Herbie and the Batmobile, too.
PHOTO: AFP
That's why Warner Brothers has essentially purchased Michigan International Speedway for the weekend. The movie studio is spending more than US$1 million here to promote the opening of Batman Begins. The Batman logo is on the Nextel Cup driver Mark Martin's racecar and the Craftsman Truck Series driver Ricky Craven's truck.
A Batman actor will serve as grand marshal, offering the traditional "Gentlemen, start your engines" before the race. The Batmobile will be showcased, too, leading all racecars on the track before today's event.
In an unusual buy, Warner Brothers even snagged the naming rights for the event. The one-shot seven-figure payout means the race will be called the "Batman Begins 400," the first time a Cup race has been so fleetingly named for a movie. The lower-tier Busch Series featured the "SpongeBob SquarePants Movie 300" last year.
"There's a lot of overlap in the NASCAR audience and the Batman Begins audience," Dawn Taubin, president of domestic marketing for Warner Brothers, said in a telephone interview last week. "NASCAR's a huge, huge sport with a huge audience, and at least from my experience is not just dedicated to actually going to the races, but to watching it on television. And I think sort of having a wholly owned NASCAR race, it seemed to be a partnership that made sense."
Particularly since NASCAR is the only sport that would sell itself this way. Imagine the Super Bowl renamed the "Batman Begins Bowl" for a year. The National Football League and its fans would consider that pure blasphemy.
Not NASCAR, which survives because of its sponsorship.
"In racing, it's different," Martin said in a conference call with reporters last week. "It can't happen without sponsors. The race fan understands that it is absolutely critical to have those sponsors for the races as well as for the teams and everything because we can't make it on television revenue. We can't even come close, you know, to racing on the revenues from ticket sales and television."
NASCAR has had sponsors from the start. That is the sport's tradition. And that is why fans are so remarkably loyal to sponsors of their favorite drivers and teams. That's their way of supporting the team. It doesn't work that way in other sports. Last fall, officials at the University of Michigan and Ohio State opted against adding name sponsorship for the annual college football game between the teams after an uproar from fans.
The same thing happened a year ago, when a deal to put an ad from the movie Spider-Man 2 on the bases during some Major League Baseball games was stopped at the last minute because of widespread criticism.
"The other sports have tried to make the playing field itself relatively sponsorship-free," Marc Ganis, a Chicago-based sports consultant, said in a telephone interview. "NASCAR athletes have been walking billboards from the beginning. So they're very comfortable with sponsorship.
"I don't know that I would call it smarter. What I would say is, they don't have the traditions of separation of some sponsors that some of the sports do. They are newer and, as a result of being newer, they can do different things."
And that has never been more apparent than in Los Angeles, where NASCAR set up an office in 2000 to try to cash in on sponsorship dollars while marketing its sport and drivers to a new audience.
These days, hardly a race goes by without a Hollywood tie-in. Joe Gibbs Racing has featured a number of movies on its racecar, from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ last year to Madagascar most recently.
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