Later today, NASCAR will unveil a brand new, first of its kind, Fan and Media Engagement Center at its headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. The center, created in partnership with Hewlett-Packard (HP) Enterprise Services, is designed to help NASCAR and its partners collaborate, make decisions, and improve the "NASCAR experience" based on insights from a variety of media, including digital, print, television, radio, video and social.
The development of a Fan and Media Engagement Center was first announced in June 2012, but was discussed within NASCAR for over a year. Its home is the 8th floor of NASCAR Plaza, where NASCAR's digital team operates. That digital team has recently gained strength due to the expiration of a deal with Turner Sports that allowed Turner to manage NASCAR's digital properties. Those rights, which Turner controlled for ten years, have been transferred back to NASCAR. With all of that in mind, NASCAR could not have picked a better time to introduce its Fan and Media Engagement Center.
"This is the brain-child of [NASCAR Chairman and CEO] Brian France," explained Steve Phelps, NASCAR’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. "He had this idea for a while, but we weren't in a position from a technology standpoint to get to where we needed to be until about a year ago. After a lot of due diligence, we chose HP. From a product and service standpoint, [HP] was clearly the right company to go with."
NASCAR is banking on HP's ability to assist with the monitoring of all chatter that has anything to do with the NASCAR brand. Social media tracking systems are nothing new, and NASCAR believes the Fan and Media Engagement Center has much more to offer than existing suites of services in the social media space. "The system tracks social media, but also allows us to ingest and understand what is happening in traditional media," said Phelps. "Anything being talked about, written about, video, local affiliates - this system can capture that and we can have an understanding of what is happening from tone to the specifics of what is being talked about."
HP is tasked with providing the industry-leading technology to give the Fan and Media Engagement Center its engine. In an interview for this article, Charles Salameh, Vice President/General Manager: Enterprise Services - Americas at Hewlett-Packard was sure to point out that his company's offering is more than a tool, it is a platform. "The big part of the Fan and Media Engagement Center that makes it unique is that most of what is out there today is in the social media space," said Salameh. "This has expanded beyond social media to pick up broadcast, blogging, television, radio, which is then aggregated and sent out for digestion for the users who wish to use it. HP’s integrated solution not only benefits NASCAR’s complex ecosystem by allowing real-time data capture and analysis across a wide variety of media, traditional as well as digital, tailored to specific audiences within the industry. It also brings great insight to HP; very much a win-win situation."
NASCAR's goal is to enhance its ability to connect with the media and fans more effectively and efficiently. The company's commitment to innovation is something everyone can root for.
Darren Heitner is an attorney at Wolfe Law Miami, P.A. in Miami, Florida, Founder of Sports Agent Blog, and Adjunct Professor of Sport Agency Management at Indiana University. Follow him at @DarrenHeitner and learn more about him at http://www.darrenheitner.com.
