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Sports Marketing

Fox Sports is giving IndyCar the Super Bowl ad treatment

The network is filling a Super Bowl ad slot with its IndyCar auto racing series campaign, which includes ads featuring stars of the sport and the GOAT of football.

INDYCAR promo on Josef Newgarden

Screenshot via IndyCar on Fox/YouTube

4 min read

While millions of Americans tune into the final game of the NFL season on Sunday, Fox Sports will be pitching a new potential hyperfixation for sports fans.

IndyCar, the open-wheel auto racing series that Fox now holds the media rights to, will get some coveted promotion time during the Super Bowl this year, according to Shelby Romero-Brown, senior manager of brand marketing at Fox Sports.

“We’d be crazy to not hit the Super Bowl with this campaign,” she said. “I think it’s always great to get ahead of it and share with [the NFL audience] and tease what’s on the horizon as far as what they can tune into next.”

While football isn’t a motorsport (although it sometimes feels like it when watching Philadelphia Eagles running back Saquon Barkley), Romero-Brown and her team are betting that the growing appeal of racing sports across the board—plus a cameo from a certain retired quarterback in the campaign—will encourage sports fans to tune into IndyCar during its first season on the network that kicks off in March.

Easy on the eyes

As part of its larger campaign, the network is running several spots featuring stars of the sport. The first of the bunch centers around back-to-back Indy 500 winner Josef Newgarden, who will be seeking a three-peat at the race this season.

The spot frames Newgarden as an action hero, with a voiceover claiming that “he might have the greatest jawline in sports.” If shots of him playing ping-pong blindfolded and walking away from an explosion movie star–style aren’t enough to grab people’s attention, the jawline comment leads into a cameo from Tom Brady skeptically saying, “He’s not that handsome.”

The second ad in the series, which first aired during the NFC Championship game, spotlights Spanish driver Álex Palou, a three-time IndyCar champ, following the same format as the Newgarden ad by teeing up Palou as “a conquistador of concrete from the start” before naming other absurd trivia, like the fact that he’s so fast “he speed-reads two novels before noon.”

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The third promo in the set, which goes live this weekend, will star Arrow McLaren driver Pato O’Ward, the 2018 Indy NXT racing series champ.

Romero-Brown said her team hasn’t yet decided which ad (or ads) will get the Super Bowl treatment, but early buzz has so far been positive. The ads are also running on IndyCar and Fox social channels, where users, including Newgarden’s teammate Scott McLaughlin, have praised the campaign.

Revving the engines

Fox is broadcasting all 17 IndyCar races, including the Indy 500, for the first time this season, and one of the aims of the campaign is to introduce viewers to the drivers, “giving them a reason to either cheer for these drivers, or not, each race day,” Romero-Brown said. It’s a tactic many sports marketers are embracing: Across sports, athlete-driven content has become an increasingly popular way for teams and leagues to grow their fan bases, especially on social media.

Fox also has Nascar broadcast rights, so motorsports aren’t entirely new to its core audience, but Romero-Brown acknowledged that doesn’t necessarily mean IndyCar is on their radar. By tapping into the star power of Brady and running the IndyCar ads during the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl, she said her team is looking to “ramp up the excitement” ahead of the season among die-hard fans and potential new ones alike. The campaign will extend beyond the football season, she said, with future marketing plans like a Valentine’s Day tie-in, since the holiday happens to mark 100 days until the Indy 500.

“We knew that we had to speak to the core IndyCar fan base, and then also wanted to appeal to the general sports fan, so people who may not have watched a race before,” Romero-Brown said. “This sport is such an adrenaline junkie–type sport that we knew that we wanted to showcase that excitement and reach that general sports fan as well.”

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