What if you threw a party and nobody showed? Well the 140,000 people who made it to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the annual running of the Brickyard 400 certainly do constitute a party, but a much more subdued one from year's past. This year's attendance was 23% lower than last year's NASCAR event, and 30% down from the 200,000 who showed up for the first Brickyard 400 in
1994. In fact, it was the fewest number of race fans to show up in the event's
17-year history.
Some blame the economy, some blame TV and the fact that many stayed home to watch the race on
ESPN from the HD comfort of their living room sofas. Some say the bloom is off the NASCAR rose, in part because of rabid corporate sponsorship that covered every inch of the cars, the track, the drivers and the layers of the sport.
Corporations now seem to have grokked this, and so sponsorship dollars are way off as well. Allstate, which for the last 5 years had title sponsorship of the Allstate Brickyard 400, let it expire this year. The race ran simply as Brickyard 400 without a sponsor. All this is part of a national trend -- 20 of the top 50 sports ad spenders cut budgets in 2009. Some, such as AT&T Wireless and Chevrolet, cut them as much as
30 percent, according to a SportsBusiness Journal analysis of data from The Nielsen Cos.
And those lack of sponsorship dollars meant there was less money to spend on advertising and promotion.
The Brickyard 400 digital footprint, which includes a web site with archival footage and a
blog and flickr page, was adequate but not enough to make up the lack of awareness from a dearth of TV and Print.
