Smile, You're A Winner!

By Steve Goldberg

When Jeff Gordon won the Coca-Cola 600 last month, he celebrated with a liter of Pepsi, his new soft-drink sponsor. It was only fair. He won the Pepsi 400 while representing Coke. The two cola giants went wheel to wheel to roll up Gordon's endorsement, one measure of the man's crossover status as a national marketing icon. With two Winston Cup stock-car championships in the past three seasons, the California-born, Indiana-honed speed merchant is one of the hottest athletes in an even hotter sport.

Along with winning his second straight Coca-Cola 600, which now rivals the previously unassailable Indy 500 for attention, Gordon is not only driving himself into a broader marketplace, but he is also taking NASCAR with him. They are like drafting partners, the racing strategy in which two cars driving bumper to bumper together can go faster than either individually. In the 50 years since NASCAR, the popular acronym for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, crawled from the beaches of Daytona, Fla., and dirt tracks of the Southeast, it has evolved into a national draw and a coveted marketing vehicle. It has even ventured into that signature business of brand overextension, NASCAR theme restaurants. For drivers such as Rusty Wallace, Dale Earnhardt and Bill Elliott, the opportunities have never been better. "We're getting more requests for NASCAR than we are for baseball, hockey or football," says Bob Williams, president of Burns Sports, a Chicago-based firm that links athletes with advertisers.

In a recent survey, Burns asked advertising creative directors and corporate marketing executives which athletes they would most desire to pitch their wares. Gordon trailed only basketball deity Michael Jordan and golfers Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer. "Gordon came at the perfect time," notes Charlotte, N.C., Motor Speedway president Humpy Wheeler, "very similar to the mid-'50s for the PGA, when TV finally figured out how to televise a match and Arnold Palmer was sitting right there. Boom, it was all they needed."

Boom defines NASCAR. More than 5.8 million fans attended the 32 Winston Cup races last year, up 66% since 1990; an additional 160 million watched on five broadcast and cable-television networks. NASCAR's TV ratings regularly beat professional basketball, baseball and hockey and are second only to the NFL in major league sports. "The real value that is going up," says Brian France, grandson of NASCAR's founder Bill France and the organization's senior vice president of marketing, "is the amount of media that companies are willing to dedicate to NASCAR. Five years ago, they didn't think the television reach was there."

NASCAR is about to test that reach. Television rights currently cost broadcasters about 35[cents] per household, compared with about $1.81 for the NFL and 95[cents] for the NBA. Track officials, who retain the TV rights, are penciling in an amount at least triple the current take. The same is true in sponsorships, which have long ceased to be a cheap thrill: the primary sponsorship of a competitive Winston Cup team hovers at around $6 million a season. Coke, having lost the Gordon endorsement to Pepsi, won the overall NASCAR sponsorship rights from its rival, while Visa has just lapped MasterCard as official credit card. "In Coca-Cola's case, in the agreements that we have in the credit-card category, in the beer category and others, we are getting the same kind of reach that the NBA, NFL and others enjoy," says France. "It's gone from very little to multimillion-dollar media commitments." One of those will be a NASCAR-themed, 60-sec. pre-feature that will run on more than 14,000 movie screens from "Alaska to Arizona to Alabama--not just in the NASCAR heartland, but in the entertainment heartland," says Steve Koonin, Coke's V.P. for presence marketing. "NASCAR is the only sport that not only appreciates sponsors, it rewards sponsors."

Wall Street has even hopped a ride. International Speedway Corp., which owns Daytona and other tracks, has been building new raceways and trackside condominiums. Its stock doubled to $37.75 before recently settling down to about $32. Track owner Speedway Motorsports Inc. hasn't been doing too badly either. "When they moved a single date from the North Wilkesboro, N.C., track to Texas, souvenir sales for another company went up twelve-fold," says Bo Cheadle, senior managing director of NationsBank Montgomery Securities. One new mutual fund is even trying to woo track-crazy investors by focusing on all racing-related companies.

Gordon, 26, isn't the only star, but he's by far the best and brightest of NASCAR's top guns. Going into last weekend's Pontiac Excitement 400, he has rolled into the winner's circle 32 times, in third place all-time with close to $18 million in winnings after only 168 races. He adorns milk-mustache ads with the likes of Pete Sampras and David Copperfield, appears with Letterman and Leno, shows up at trendy Oscar parties and on PEOPLE magazine's list of the 50 most beautiful people. Yet after six full seasons in stock-car racing's major league, Gordon is still the youngest of the Winston Cup regulars.

Evidence of Gordon's emergence as a crossover hit came in last year's running of the Winston, NASCAR's version of the All-Star game. Gordon ran to the front in a car whose dinosaur paint scheme celebrated Universal Studios' opening of Jurassic Park: The Ride. Pepsi cast him in a spot with pitchmeisters Deion Sanders and Shaquille O'Neal before cutting loose with a solo commercial, which debuted during the Super Bowl.

Pepsi, a longtime NASCAR sponsor, has in fact redirected its race against Coke by hitching its wagon to Gordon, hoping it can emulate his ability to win coming from behind. "They said all the right things," notes Gordon of the Pepsi switch. "They've really got behind me and done exactly what they said they were going to do." After ceding its "official soft drink of NASCAR" status to Coke this year, the company has essentially said, We'll take Gordon, you take the rest. "He's an exciting new-generation athlete who matches up with Pepsi's personality," effuses Rick Rock, vice president of media and entertainment marketing for Pepsi.

Gordon, together with his beauty-queen wife Brooke, is featured on packages of Close-Up toothpaste. Once a top seller in the '70s, the Chesebrough-Pond's brand is using Gordon and his wife to retool the product. With their faces on 3.5 million collectible packages and 25,000 store displays, the company says it has gained record market share."It's been phenomenal," says Nancy Heller, brand manager for Close-Up. "We thought it was going to be a regional program, and to our surprise, we were able to do this nationally."

That's all the marketers need to hear. Notes Charlotte's Wheeler, who has seen all of NASCAR's 50 years: "He's got the potential of doing what athletes like Palmer and Ali, Joe Namath and Babe Ruth and DiMaggio did, and that is to transcend the sport they're in." At 200 m.p.h., that may be especially easy.