You may not know this, but folks who watch NASCAR can get a little bit—just a little bit—excited about the races. Some might even call them fanatics, though that sounds a little condescending. After all, who among us hasn’t dreamed of high-speed suburban stunt driving? Who hasn’t run a stopwatch while changing a tire at home in the driveway? Who hasn’t triumphantly sprayed an elderly couple with Champagne on their 50th wedding anniversary?
It’s just that sort of dedication to the NASCAR lifestyle that a new series of spots from Young & Rubicam (Y&R), Chicago, seeks to build on. In the eight spots, all directed by Paul Gay of Omaha Pictures, Santa Monica, a normal family—mom, dad, son and daughter—go about their regular day-to-day lives, but with a NASCAR-flavored twist
In "Diner," for example, a traditional wood-paneled station wagon pulls up to a local restaurant, and all four family members, rather than exiting through the car doors, calmly leap out the windows. And in "Badminton," the camera slowly pans from a bucolic shot of the kids playing badminton to reveal dad’s backyard pastime: replacing the car window glass with badminton netting. Each spot ends with the tag: "How bad have you got it?," referring, of course, to NASCAR fever.
The challenge for the Y&R team—creative director/art director Jon Wyville, copywriters Ken Erke and Tohru Oyasu, and director of broadcast production Karim Bartoletti—was to draft a concept that would appeal to die-hard fans as well as those on the fringe: ESPN watchers, football fans who could be converted, your average sports-watching Joe.
"We were just trying to do something that would give fans a little smile and that they could relate to and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me. I’m that crazy about it,’ " explains Wyville. At the same time, he says, "by showing how obsessed the fans can be for the sport, it shows new viewers that there’s really something in there. It’s more than cars going around the track in a circle. There’s a lot of that great minutiae, the little details you can get used to that really make you a fanatic."
New blood
It’s a delicate balance: For every person who can explain the point system and knows what "The Cale Scale" is, there’s another who can’t tell Daytona from Duluth. NASCAR may be America’s second most popular televised sport—just behind football—but much of its appeal is still regional.
Before the Y&R creatives could dream up scripts and storyboards, however, they needed to learn the minutiae themselves. A few of the ways they immersed themselves in the category was by watching lots of races, visiting NASCAR.com and even reading NASCAR for Dummies cover-to-cover, Wyville jokes.
Observing NASCAR fans in their natural habitat, the team picked up on a key aspect of the sport: It’s a family affair.
"Families travel together for weekends to see the sport," Wyville explains. "It’s not just dad going to the races—the whole families are into it. Dad has his favorite racers, the kids have their favorite drivers. Everybody gets into it."
The family theme resonated with the NASCAR organization; and Y&R’s Chicago office, two years into an effort to ramp up its creative force, beat out top national agencies such as Cliff Freeman and Partners, New York, and TBWA/Chiat/ Day, Los Angeles to win the first NASCAR branding campaign.
"We knew by the agencies they were talking to that they wanted good creative," says Wyville. "But they also needed sort of a strategic focus and somebody who could help organize the media and the way that’s all divvied up. … They needed some smart thinkers who could also do good creative."
Indeed, their pitch was so successful that the campaign they presented ended up as the one that went into production.
But first they needed someone to direct their work. They chose Paul Gay, whom they knew from his spots for Volkswagen, Nordstrom and the British Army. "We felt he was right from the start," says Oyasu, adding that they liked his "realistic, subtle humor. We never wanted to do spots that were broad."
And since Y&R already had its concepts solidified, with a range of spots that would appeal to NASCAR newbies as well as to rabid fans, Wyville adds, "really, he just had to come in as a filmmaker and make them work from that end."
"Are you worried about the fact that he’s British and we’re NASCAR?" Bartoletti said the client asked him. He responded: "In reality? No. Because we talk to the directors before we hire them, and we had a conference call, and he gets it. Your campaign is comedic, and he understands comedy. And he understands the type of comedy we want to go for, and he understands the fact that you have to walk that very thin line between laughing at the person and laughing with the person. … You will laugh at the campaign regardless of what country you’re in."
Bartoletti’s argument worked. NASCAR understood: Gay gets it. The director shot quickly: Eight spots in seven days, with the crew sometimes pulling off two in a single day. The downtown L.A. stunt driving of "Daydream," however, took two-and-a-half days to capture on film.
Viewers can observe Gay’s straightforward comedic style in "Family Project," in which dad drives junior home, perhaps from soccer practice, coasting through the anonymous streets of their suburb. Junior, however, is videotaping the whole journey, and when they reach home they rush to replay the tape—in fast-forward mode. Dad and junior look at each other, gleefully, as the ad cuts to the tag. The spot is unembellished, simple, with all the humor coming from that final moment of recognition: These are serious fans.
Whether that style will woo new NASCAR fans remains to be seen, but so far, Wyville says, "it seems everybody’s been crazy about it. We’ll continue on within the next couple months concepting next year’s ideas to just see what we can have the family do next year."
