Nationwide CMO Talks Sports Sponsorships and ROI

Nationwide Insurance is building on the success of its seven-year deal (currently in its third year) with NASCAR to include sports sponsorships this year with football teams like the Pittsburgh Steelers, Cincinnati Bengals, North Carolina Tar Heels and the PGA Tour’s Memorial Tournament. The architect of Nationwide's strategy, CMO Jim Lyski, is now applying its national NASCAR sponsorship model to regional sports deals. Lyski, who joined Nationwide four years ago after marketing jobs at Cigna and FedEx, chatted with Brandweek about how sports is translating into return on investment and how Nationwide is competing for consumers in a category of big spenders.Brandweek: What kind of return have you seen from your NASCAR sponsorship, which features Dale Earnhardt, Jr.? Jim Lyski: We’re in the middle of the third year of our sponsorship of the NASCAR Nationwide Series and it’s gone quite well, above our projected return plans. We’ve already hit above break-even investment return in the first quarter of 2010, which we didn’t anticipate till the conclusion of this year. We’ve seen unaided awareness among NASCAR fans grow by 50 percent since we started this sponsorship and have had large gains in generating leads. Last year, we were at 183 percent of our goal for our leads. This year, we’ll probably double the number of leads we generate via the NASCAR sponsorship. Buying rates are up year over year for the third consecutive year now. What works with the NASCAR fan is the genuineness of whatever you’re promoting. In Dale, Jr. we have a person who has been part of the Nationwide family for over 30 years. His father went out and got policies for their vehicles, their house, life insurance and the NASCAR fan knows that. So it’s a combination of reaching people with a passion point, having a genuineness of the offer, the proposition, and then fulfill against it. That’s our model right now. BW: How did you select these new sports sponsorships you’ve forged this year?JL: Nationwide has a geographic footprint that is kind of uneven. In some markets we’re by far the biggest in our category, in other markets we’re no. 4 or 5, so we look for geographies where we can heavy up spend. We took this NASCAR model and looked at whether we could we apply it at more of a regional level and that’s what we did markets like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and North Carolina. There are some good sports properties there that really resonate with our customer base. It’s very early days of these extended sponsorships but they’ve gone quite well for us so far.BW: Earlier this year, Nationwide introduced "The World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World" campaign, via McKinney. Why the change in tone and how is the strategy evolving?JL: If you look at our category, our top three or four competitors are spending $1.3 billion, $900 million, $800 million and $700 million. This has got to be the most crowded marketing category out there so we went back to humor as a break-through vehicle. If you’re going to get a frequency of six and you’re competing against someone who’s getting a frequency of 30 you really need to be noticed and 'The World’s Greatest Spokesperson' breaks through the clutter. It uses some great visual icons with the blue phone, some good mnemonic icons with the jingle. Those are things you’ll see in our ads coupled with the spokesperson and it has really helped us to maximize spending and reach with consumers. We’ve seen lifts in recall and consideration and we’ve seen pretty much across-the-board improvement over the previous campaign.BW: How has the recession changed your messaging and use of media?JL: It’s changed on two or three fronts. First, we really need to make sure every dollar delivers so we spend a lot of time on the upfront metrics and analysis: We go in with a strong hypothesis of exactly what we’re going to get from every dollar that we spend. Second, during the recession it was very important for our target customers that we offer something tangible. You can’t just talk in flowery language; you have to say Nationwide will deliver ‘X’. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a price message—you see a lot of people in our category with a price message—it just has to be something that is perceived as valuable and tangible, something I care about and I believe. A lot of our message is focused on that. One spot we’re running is about our vanishing deductible because every year you drive safely we’re going to lower your deductible by $100. That’s very tangible to consumers. The third thing is on the media front. Because of those first two elements, we’ve really focused down on a smaller set of media. We’re going for a little increased frequency at those passion points, whether sports or sponsorship-related, or whether it’s entertainment or TV-viewing related. We’re just trying to hit people where they have a high, vested interest. BW: Nationwide was the first in the category to launch an iPhone app. What have you learned about how people are using it?JL: Our iPhone app has been downloaded well over 100,000 times and we’ve enhanced it since its launch. We look really hard at what things should be an app versus what things should be embedded into our mobile website. There was a strong proliferation of apps early on but more and more, for the stuff you use on a regular basis, you just want it embedded in a mobile website. We’re going to still do apps and we’ll have them for Android and other devices shortly but embedding that core functionality on your mobile website is definitely the path that we’re on.

Brand Marketing

Nationwide CMO Talks Sports Sponsorships and ROI

Noreen O'Leary

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Noreen O'Leary