Richard Petty Driving Experience increases fan engagement 700 ...

Who they are
Richard Petty Driving Experience
• Headquarters: Concord, North Carolina
• Employees: 450+ employees
• Website: www.drivepetty.com
• Channel: www.youtube.com/drivepetty
Goals
• Maximize sales during slow business period
• Share the NASCAR experience through
emotional impact of video
• Enable cost-effective, rapid content video
production
Approach
• Create great content, including fan
testimonials, that relate to audience
• Use TrueView in-stream video ads to
captivate new customers
• Take advantage of 30-day Remarketing
option
Results
• Increased YouTube channel viewers by
700% month-over-month by engaging
107,000 viewers to a single promotion
• Retained more than half of video viewers
through to end of :60+ TrueView in-stream
video clip
• 16% of viewers viewed the entire clip at a
$0.10 cost-per-view
Case Study | Richard Petty Driving Experience
Richard Petty Driving Experience increases
fan engagement 700% with YouTube
At NASCAR races—the most popular spectator sport in the U.S—it’s all about
heart-pounding action. Can you imagine actually strapping yourself behind the
wheel of a NASCAR race car and hitting nearly 165 mph like the pros? Not only
can you imagine it, you can live it at The Richard Petty Driving Experience, where
fantasy becomes reality for thousands of fans at racetracks across the country
who pay to experience race car driving on the track.
Elliott Antal, eMarketing Manager at The Richard Petty Driving Experience,
knows how to turn fans into customers using the power of sight, sound, and
motion. “NASCAR is something you have to see, hear, and feel—the roar of
the engines, the speed of the vehicles, the breathless expressions on people’s
faces when they are up close and personal,” he explains. “Right around the
same time I started working at the Experience, Google was coming out with
amazingly powerful tools that enable smaller companies like ours to play in the
same online sandbox with industry giants.” Working closely with Google, Antal
implemented a “hugely successful” YouTube TrueView in-stream ad promotion
that increased fan engagement by 700% — raising viewership from just over
14,000 to over 117,000 during a 30 day promotion.
Pushing the sales needle
To capture new business during the company’s typically slow summer months,
the sales team created a Summer of Speed package, inviting everyday people
to spend a day or a weekend geared up to drive (or ride in) NASCAR race cars.
The Experience’s YouTube channel was already loaded with great content from
television news coverage, ESPN footage and reality shows. Viewership was
growing through social networks as well as from natural search.
But the company had yet to mount a targeted sales effort for its driving
experience—and here was the perfect opportunity to take the YouTube
TrueView product out for a test drive to see just how powerful a strong call-toaction
could be.
“We used our strongest tool—video—to inexpensively execute a campaign
powered by Google, the company that has mastered the art and science of
search, and is now putting brilliant video advertising techniques into the hands
of advertisers large and small,” notes Antal.
TrueView in-stream ads ensure viewers are engaged by enabling them to
watch or skip after the first five seconds when the ad plays before a show.
The advertiser only pays when a viewer watches at least :30 seconds of the
video without choosing to “skip” the ad, which counts as an increased view on
YouTube. Out of 107,000 Summer of Speed views, over half of viewers watched
the entire video, which lasted over a minute. “Crazy good, in my book,” says
Antal, adding that, unlike other ad programs, TrueView in-stream ads allows
clips to run over the :60 mark.

“Right around the same time I started
working at the Experience, Google was
coming out with amazingly powerful
tools that enable smaller companies like
ours to play in the same online sandbox
with industry giants.”
With 650,000 overall impressions and a low cost-per-view, Summer of Speed
sales exceeded expectations. “Results were so hot, we didn’t want the campaign
to end,” says Antal, who ended up pulling additional dollars into the effort to
further boost the uptick in sales numbers.
No other content on the Experience’s YouTube channel had reached the
100,000 viewer mark. “It was incredibly exciting for everyone at the company to
watch those numbers pick up pace in real time,” says Antal. No other print or
media advertising was used to market the Summer of Speed package, or any
other Richard Petty Driving Experience promotion.
One of the biggest advantages of the TrueView program, and one that is too
often lost in the shuffle, claims Antal, is the 30-day Remarketing option in
TrueView, which enables advertisers to reach out to site visitors who didn’t buy,
but have expressed interested in a product or service. “Remarketing is one of
the most cost-effective strategies out there. It can have a profound impact on a
business model and help formulate what you want to sell when.”
More tips from one who’s been there, done that, on a small budget: “Test
everything so you can justify it. Keep successes in you back pocket so you can
refer to them down the road and not waste resources re-inventing wheels that
don’t need it,” says Antal.
As a constant reminder of how to tell a great video story, Antal regularly strolls
down to the pit, turns on a flip cam, and points it at overwhelmed customers as
they climb out of the cockpit. Footage captured, emotion prevailed. “Find your
niche and off to the races you go. Little advertisers with little budgets can make
big noise,” he says.
Streamlined production
While not all advertisers are lucky enough to have the ready-for-closeup ESPN
pit reporter Jamie Little as a spokesperson, advertisers still should put the most
compelling part of their content up front no matter what, advises Antal. The first
five seconds of the Summer of Speed promo featured a laughing Jamie Little
trackside, cars zooming by, asking the viewer if they’d rather spend summertime
and money in air-conditioning while lolling on the couch, or behind the wheel of
race car.
“NASCAR is something you have to see, hear, and feel—the roar of the engines, the
speed of the vehicles, the breathless expressions on people’s faces when they are up
close and personal.”
—Elliott Antal, eMarketing Manager at The Richard Petty Driving Experience

About YouTube
YouTube is the premier destination to find,
upload, watch, and share video online. Google
and YouTube are committed to innovating
with video to create compelling services for
users, content owners, and advertisers.
For more information visit:
www.youtube.com/advertise
“We used our strongest tool—video—
to inexpensively execute a campaign
powered by Google, the company that
has mastered the art and science of
search, and is now putting brilliant video
advertising techniques into the hands of
advertisers large and small.”
—Elliott Antal, eMarketing Manager at
The Richard Petty Driving Experience
Having a good relationship with a local video crew is also key to success,
according to Antal. With low-cost equipment readily available, affordable talent
is there for all budgets. What’s important is that a crew has the right feel for
your product, shows creativity, and can edit fast. The entire Summer of Speed
video was produced over one weekend, and the final cut was on Antal’s desktop
two weeks later.
In between promotions, the Richard Petty Experience team uploads quick
customer testimonials from the side of the racetrack. They have been able to
capture raw emotion from customers like John Anderson, who speak directly to
the camera in between laps around the track.
Moving forward, the Experience team plans to launch a new program called
Exotic Driving Experience again using YouTube to sell it. He wouldn’t be
surprised if results surpassed Summer of Speed, attracting a new audience
longing to drive a Lamborghini around a track. “The car is the star,” he says, “and
video is its runway.”
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