Maximum Value : One Company Has Found a Way to Make Advertising Pay, and Some Sponsors Get a Bargain for Their Money

He sits there with a computer keyboard on his lap, watching as Greg Moore’s Indy car zips around the Milwaukee track on television.

Bing, there’s the STP sign, and bing, there’s MCI, and bing, there’s Kool on the car’s wing, and bing, there’s MCI again, and bing, there’s Goodyear, and bing, there’s Texaco on the side pod, and bing, there’s Ford.

Eric Wright types STP, MCI, KOO, MCI, GOO, TEX, FOR.

Five seconds have passed.

And there’s Texaco again, an in-car camera revealing the track in front of Michael Andretti’s machine, Wright seeing its logo-festooned side pods in the picture for one, two, three . . . six seconds, and Wright types again.

Texaco has gotten six seconds of advertising time it didn’t directly buy during an Indy car telecast, and Joyce Julius Cotman has another satisfied customer.

Her company, Joyce Julius and Associates, puts out “The Sponsors Report” and the “NTIV Analysis,” which have become bibles of motor racing, in which dollars translate to horsepower and cars dressed up like billboards chase each other in what have become three-hour infomercials.

They measure the times you can clearly see a sign or a logo during a race and translate those exposures into dollar figures, based on the cost of a 30-second advertisement on the program and the rating of the telecast.

If an ad costs $60,000 for 30 seconds, Texaco got $12,000 from its in-car camera shot, by Joyce Julius’ reckoning, and it mounts up.

Last year, NASCAR sponsors got $842,459,300 of comparable ad time in 31 races. The top sponsor, Winston, picked up $40,085,520 of that, which is time it couldn’t buy because a tobacco company can’t advertise on television.

And when drivers, whose ability to plug a sponsor is congenital, get going, the money rolls up.

When Dale Earnhardt says he had trouble passing the 88 car, nothing happens. But Dale Jarrett, driver of old No. 88, might say “the Ford Quality Care, Ford Credit Ford Thunderbird [inhale] was really rolling today.” And back in the office of the brick building in Ann Arbor, Mich., Bob Prebola, the NASCAR editor of “The Sponsors Report”--Wright is the Indy car editor--gets tired fingers.

And it’s not only cars. Think the NBA uses a Spalding ball because it bounces better? The league went to Joyce Julius and Associates to find out just how valuable it was to be the official ball of the NBA.

While Karl Malone stands at the free throw line and you’re looking into his televised eyes as they sight the basket, somebody in the Joyce Julius office in Ann Arbor, Mich., is looking for “Spalding” on the basketball in his hands. If it shows, bing, there’s a hit and ca-ching, Commissioner David Stern’s cash register rings.

Last year, Joyce Julius did 35 hours of curling, looking for sponsor mentions. This year, it will do 18-20 hours of bull-riding, looking for sponsorship possibilities. It taped 45 shows--nine analysts doing them at home for extra money and bringing the tapes to work--last weekend and will do 1,500 this year.

The San Antonio Spurs called, looking for help in getting a new arena, and Joyce Julius started counting the televised mentions of San Antonio so the team could go back to the city fathers with evidence of just how valuable the NBA franchise was, and how it would be a shame if it was moved to Anaheim or someplace.

Buick wants help figuring out how much it’s really getting for sponsoring four PGA Tour events. For $20,000, it knows where to go.

All of this came out of some pizza stores, and from Phil Rossette, who was sitting in his basement in Chicago with a TV and a stopwatch, wondering who would pay him to use them.

It was 1982, and Domino’s had just opened its 500th store and had big ideas.

“They were going to do their first national TV buy,” says Joyce Julius Cotman, whose husband, Bob, is part of the firm.

“Domino’s had a very low awareness factor outside of a Domino’s pizza delivery area, and Bob had started an advertising company and they went to him to buy the national exposure. The company came back with a proposal about this long.”

She holds her fingers a couple of inches apart. Domino’s was willing to spend $300,000 to go national, about the equivalent of 30 seconds of the Super Bowl telecast at the time.

Enter Doug Shierson, who was looking for help with his Indy car team.

For the $300,000, and an additional $100,000-$150,000 during the year, Bob Cotman bought sponsorship of an Indy car.

He also bought trouble.

“You can imagine 500 of the most angry franchisees in the world because this stupid person took an entire national advertising budget that was going to buy their first national TV advertising and bought a stupid race car,” Joyce says.

Cotman hired Joyce Julius--they later married--to oversee the program and keep the store owners from killing him. Shierson put Howdy Holmes in the car and went racing.

They didn’t win, but they were seen on television all over the country.

“I had never seen a car on a track before, so I had no idea what I was getting into, what the boundaries were, what the limits were,” Joyce says. “So we just kind of forged ahead.”

And got results, they thought.

“The hardest thing I had to do was prove we were getting exposure,” Joyce says. “There was a study out . . . which measures your awareness nationwide. In 1982, when we got the race car, we had a 7% unaided awareness nationwide. That meant that if I would ask you to name three pizza companies, 7% would name Domino’s one of the three. Within a three-year span of having this race car, we went from a 7% to an 87% unaided nationwide.”

By that time, Holmes was out of the car and Danny Sullivan was in it, and he won at Cleveland. But also by that time, there were 500 more Domino’s stores and company owner Tom Monaghan had bought the Detroit Tigers to much national fanfare--”Pizza Guy Buys Tigers”--so there was still some doubt about this racing business.

Enter Rossette and his stopwatch in his basement in Chicago. Texaco had asked him to check on its television exposure in racing, and he came up with the idea of “The Sponsors Report,” using only the top 10 sponsors in the sport. He was selling it for $40, the money buying typo-laden papers with light blue ink so nobody could photocopy his work.

He asked the Cotmans if they would like to subscribe. Joyce and Bob bought six subscriptions, then bought the company, got rid of the stopwatch, computerized everything and started hiring people--there are 22 full-time employees now--and hunting clients.

And being hunted by clients. The $40 report now costs $1,200 a year, and specialty reports go for more. NASCAR clients pay $1,400 a year, and others as much as $4,000 for reports, $20,000 for projects.

Joyce Julius Associates has never advertised. It doesn’t have to.

From television data, it produces “The Sponsors Report.” Adding in radio and print media--250 newspapers, every one they can find in the United States with a circulation over 100,000, including the Los Angeles Times, are delivered every day and 35 motor sports magazines every week or month--the company generates the “NTIV Analysis.”

Drivers and race team owners use it to keep sponsors happy and hunt fresh money. They point out that racing fans are twice as product-loyal as NFL fans.

Companies use it to pull sponsorships from unsuccessful teams that aren’t getting on television enough.

“We’re a double-edged sword,” Joyce acknowledges.

Bausch and Lomb used it to renegotiate a contract with the International Olympic Committee when the company paid for its goggles to be the official goggles of the Winter Games, and then saw skiers using other equipment.

MGM Grand used it in court to help determine how much it lost when a heavyweight championship fight was spirited away to Caesars Palace.

It brings good news and bad. When Unocal wondered why it had spent more money at Talladega than the year before and got less incidental exposure, it called Joyce. Tapes were pulled, and it was found that the previous year’s race had been fraught with wrecks and caution flags. It seemed that every time a caution came up, there was Unocal’s orange-ball logo in the background.

The next year’s race was virtually caution-free, and as a result, free of the orange ball logo.

And this year, Joyce Julius even measured irony.

“With the rain at Indy this year, the total dollar value was over $200 million in exposure for the sponsors,” she says. “With the rain, the TV network [ABC] would go back and show old races, they would go into garages and interview drivers, and it’s all sponsors’ exposure.”

But the old races included cars from CART, now the mortal enemy of IRL, the brainchild of Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Tony George. So Chevrolet and Ford, whose engines are no longer used in IRL, got almost $500,000 each in exposure without even being at the track.

Wright and Prebola watch and type, 3,000-5,000 bings for an Indy car race, 5,000-10,000 for a longer Winston Cup event. The companies get computations of billions of dollars of time that may be the best of all because it’s more-or-less free, and because when the 30-second television commercial comes on with frogs sticking their tongues on the beer truck or a chicken crossing the road to get a cold brew, you’re heading to the refrigerator for one of your own. And when the race comes back on, you’re back in your chair, watching Ricky Craven’s “Bud” car pass another on the track.

And they also give sponsors ideas on how to get more. Once, a race team owner had to be wheedled to allow a camera to be strapped on his machine. Now the networks sell the little in-car beauties for about $25,000 a race, and the team owner slides sponsors’ decals onto the firewall of his car, into the camera’s eye view.

And hopes the car doesn’t wreck early and blow his $25,000 investment.

“The in-car camera can make or break a sponsor in some races,” Wright says.

The money rolls in to Joyce Julius Associates, which has carved out a niche in racing and has no real competition.

“You have to wonder why, because it’s simple,” Joyce says. “We’re not exactly doing brain surgery here.”

No, but reading minds is in the future.

“We’d like to get into psychographic field,” she says. “We can tell you what you’re getting in exposure, but we can’t tell you what people are thinking when they see it. That type of research is very badly needed right now, but it’s expensive and it takes a commitment.”

And some strong and steady fingers on the hands of Eric Wright and Bob Prebola.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Top Sponsors’ Exposures

Value of incidental TV exposure of the top five NASCAR sponsors in 1996:

*--*

Company Time* Mentions** Dollars*** Winston 14:47:01 2,662 $40,085,520 Ford 10:56:55 2,289 34,422,895 Chevrolet 9:04:54 1,771 26,948,285 Unocal 9:02:07 173 17,684,990 Pontiac 4:49:13 1,169 15,277,175

*--*

* Total time on television screen; ** Number of verbal mentions in telecasts; *** Calculated on a cost per 30-second commercial on the telecasts.

Source: Joyce Julius and Associates