NASCAR Survey says Car Manufacturers losing fan recognition

Chevy, Ford and Toyota each spend $8M to $9M per year on NASCAR advertising. Over $25M annual advertising spend from the manufacturers. Despite this, TV ratings continue to plummet

Anheuser-Busch’s return to NASCAR was welcomed like a cold beer on a hot summer day writes David Broughton of Sports Business Daily.

Forty-one percent of NASCAR fans correctly identified Busch as the sport’s official beer, a status it acquired in March, in our 12th annual Sponsor Breakthrough survey conducted for Sports Business Journal by Turnkey Intelligence.

When the inaugural survey was fielded in 2007, Anheuser-Busch was in its final year of a 20-season NASCAR partnership. Seventy-one percent of fans in that survey knew Budweiser was the official beer, making it one of the most recognized such relationships in sports. Coors Light spent the next decade as the official beer but averaged just a 25 percent awareness level during that stretch, topping A-B only once.

A-B spent $4.9 million to advertise during NASCAR telecasts last season, according to iSpot.tv, a fivefold increase over 2017.

Other notable findings from the data:

All three of the league’s auto partners saw a year-over-year decline: Chevrolet was down 6 percentage points, Ford slipped 7 points and Toyota was down 8. All three of them are consistently among the top ad spenders, with each committing $8 million to $9 million last year.

51 percent of the fans were aware of M&M’s official partnership, an increase of 7 percentage points over 2017. David Broughton/Sports Business Daily