WASHINGTON — Lawmakers questioned Thursday the effectiveness of the $56 million the Army National Guard will spend on sports marketing contracts this year in deals with clients like NASCAR and IndyCar.
As the defense budget faces cuts, senators asked the National Guard to prove that money spent on sports sponsorship agreements is enticing recruits. If not, the senators said, money may be pulled from the Guard’s recruitment budget.
“The Army National Guard spends 37 percent of its marketing and advertising budget on sports sponsorships,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. “According to one National Guard recruiting official, however, not a single National Guard soldier was recruited from the NASCAR sponsorship program in 2012, and the program generated fewer than 8,000 leads in 2013.”
Befuddled over what he said was a lack of an evaluation system for how the National Guard spends recruitment dollars, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said that the sports sponsorships deserve a “caution flag.” “To me this is gobbeldy-gook, what we need to be looking at is pretty basic in terms of measurement of effectiveness,” Johnson said.
Maj. Gen. Judd Lyons, acting director of the National Guard, said it is difficult to translate dollars spent on marketing into a number of recruits enlisted.
He added the notice the National Guard gets from branding strategies with groups like NASCAR and IndyCar are tough to quantify. “Trying to tie that awareness directly down to an individual affirmative decision to join the National Guard is elusive,” Lyons told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee.
“Our NASCAR sponsorship is a marketing program… Its effectiveness is measured in terms of exposure with our target audience – the 18-34 age demographic,” said Jeremy Webster, a National Guard spokesman.
The deal “allows the National Guard to leverage a 77 million fan base and the sport’s most popular driver [Dale Earnhardt Jr.] to reach that demographic,” he said.
But because the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard have all dropped contracts with NASCAR because of its high costs, senators remained skeptical.
David Higdon, the managing director of NASCAR’s integrated marketing communications team, said many firms contract with NASCAR is because it works for business. “Our fans are among the most brand-loyal in all of sports.”
The National Guard doesn’t contract directly with NASCAR, but has joined in a sponsorship partnership with Hendrick Motorsports, a NASCAR team for which Dale Earnhardt Jr. drives.
The National Guard is plastered across and on top of Earnhardt’s Chevrolet SS car. When he won the Daytona 500 this year, his number 88 car brought the Guard’s logo to the attention of millions. Repucom, a sports marketing research firm, estimated that the win alone brought in advertising that would cost millions of dollars.
A study conducted for the National Guard by the independent firm Alan Newman Research found that NASCAR fans in the age group the Guard targets are twice as likely as non-fans to consider the military as a career option.
“Ninety percent of Army National Guard soldiers who enlisted or re-enlisted from 2007-2013 said they have been exposed to the Guard through recruiting or retention materials that incorporated NASCAR,” the report noted.
National Guard recruiting drew unwanted attention on Capitol Hill in February. A subcommittee hearing revealed potentially widespread abuse of the National Guard’s Recruiting Assistance Program, which paid members, civilians and retirees to recruit friends and family — but lacked safeguards.
If the National Guard is not able to show that sports sponsorships are necessary, McCaskill said, “Then we will try to take steps to remove that money from their budget.”
