Fixing IndyCar, part 4: Connecting with fans
IndyCar, IndyCar commentary — By Steph Wallcraft on December 18, 2012 1:51 pmLink back to:
Fixing IndyCar: An introduction
Fixing IndyCar, part 1: Defining the sport
Fixing IndyCar, part 2: Creating heroes
Fixing IndyCar, part 3: Healing from within
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Let me begin this installment by repeating something that’s been pointed out to me several times since this series began and that is absolutely true: the IndyCar paddock is one of the most open facilities anywhere in the sporting world. Imagine everyday fans being able to cruise through the locker room before a Cowboys game or take their kids for a stroll around the ice before a Red Wings game — or even find the same access to the equipment and the drivers of the Formula 1 paddock. It simply does not happen.
The way that the Series and its teams embrace fans new and old with things like tweet-ups, driver meet and greets, and even letting kids climb into their cars for photos contributes greatly to fan investment in the sport. This is one of the best things IndyCar has going for it, and it must absolutely be celebrated.
However, there are a great number of ways in which the IndyCar paddock — and Series administration in particular — screw up their interactions with fans on a shockingly regular basis, and these things need to be repaired if IndyCar is going to be respected as a top-tier sport in America. If they go unchecked, fans will turn around and leave as quickly as they come in when they discover how deeply the organization as a whole undervalues their contributions — and, more importantly, their entertainment dollars.
This post isn’t going to mince words, mainly because I have a lot of information to cram into a small amount of space. It’s also going to come across as a sort of Airing of Grievances (‘tis the season, after all). I’ll issue my customary Canadian apology up front, but I don’t think it will help me this time — someone is bound to end up annoyed.
I’ll take the hit, though, in the interest of the greater good. Few things would do more to allow IndyCar’s current fan base to get excited about the sport and want to share it with others than resolving these simple issues.
Here they are, in no particular order.
– The ongoing issues with Timing and Scoring must be resolved. When Joe Fan sits down to monitor a practice session from home, what is the primary information he’s looking for? He wants to know who’s fastest, and he wants to know which drivers are faster and slower than his driver. Speed is what this sport is about from top to bottom.
That said, Timing and Scoring should Just Work. No exceptions, no excuses. Nothing makes IndyCar look more low-rent than when a fan takes time out of his busy weekend to check on practice times only to find that the wrong driver names are listed, the results aren’t updating properly, or — as has happened occasionally — the connection from the track isn’t working at all.
Every other major racing series on the planet gets this right. You should, too. And you shouldn’t need pats on the back when it happens. It should work so well so consistently that no one even considers that it might not. Anything less is completely unacceptable.
– Video streaming needs to come back. The TV contracts won’t let IndyCar stream stuff live that’s also being shown on TV. That’s been made clear, and most people will accept it, if begrudgingly.
But several times over the past couple of years, fans have appealed to IndyCar asking why the sessions that aren’t shown on live TV couldn’t be streamed. They never got an answer. Through some deeper investigative work, a few cunning folks contacted the TV partners and were told that they weren’t the problem and there were no contractual barriers to off-TV sessions being streamed.
Fans were forced to conclude, then, that IndyCar had decided that the cost of setting up streaming isn’t worth the return. How powerfully backward this thinking is! If a team is in place that can set up a system and make it Just Work (just like Timing and Scoring and every other online tool should), then the cost of doing this shouldn’t be terribly high — the cameras need to be in place for the at-track video feed anyway. People don’t pay attention to your sport to watch Pac-mans. They tune in to watch race cars. And not only are you creating deep animosity with your fan base by disconnecting them from your race weekends over a small budget cut, but you’re also taking away an opportunity to introduce race cars to potential new fans at no cost — or even for a live session to go viral if it gets really interesting.
And by the way, while we’re on the subject of appeals being ignored…
– Don’t ignore fan questions. The example above is a key one. Here’s another.
This year, IndyCar set up a YouTube channel and started posting full-length videos of the television broadcasts a few days after each event. Fantastic, right?
We Canadians were particularly excited because we were being screwed around by TSN, the TV entity up here that held IndyCar’s rights contract until the end of this past season. If they pre-empt IndyCar and our PVRs miss the broadcast yet again, we thought, at least we’ll have a way to catch up a few days later.
That pre-empting inevitably happened, and Canadians tried to access the YouTube channel only to find that nasty “This video cannot be viewed in your country” message. Groups of us flocked to social media and begged and pleaded for an explanation. What did we get in response? Nothing.
I only learned the true answer in an unrelated email with an IndyCar staffer who made a flippant comment about television rights (but by then, most people had concluded that on their own).
This is no way to treat your most dedicated. Even if the answer you have isn’t the one people want to hear, you still need to let them hear it. Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away; it only breeds and festers resentment. The department is called “public relations” for a reason.
To take this concept one step further: one thing I hope IndyCar takes away from its time with Randy Bernard at the helm is that a policy of openness is paramount to fostering fan interest. People who love a sport want to know every detail about its inner workings, and things like explanations of penalties feed that appetite nicely. IndyCar’s policies in that regard this past season were refreshing. Things like that can contribute to fan investment. I sincerely hope that is able to continue under the new administration.
And taking yet another step: silencing some of your senior staffers on social media is a very bad idea. It’s not a secret that several people were told to stop answering fan questions online this season. Again, that’s not going to make the questions go away — it’s only going to make it seems like no one cares that the questions exist. Getting a direct answer to a question from an insider, even if it’s not the answer anyone wants, is an extremely exciting experience for a fan. Taking away that opportunity for engagement is yet another example of backward thinking.
– IMS Radio needs to make some policy adjustments. If IndyCar is going to insist on having T&S and IMS Radio as its only links to fans during online-only sessions, then IMS Radio needs to be tasked with doing its job extremely well to compensate for the lack of visual connection.
Right now, for the most part, that’s simply not happening.
When observers at home are tuning in for a practice session, they want to know what’s happening in that session at that moment, not what so-and-so said on Twitter and what Ed Carpenter had for dinner last night. I’ve made this argument before, so I’ll save some time and link it here.
On top of that, consider this scenario, which is a true story that has happened to several friends of mine several times: A west coast fan wakes up at 5:30 AM to follow the morning warm-up on race day. Bleary-eyed and with energy drink in hand, she fires up IndyCar Race Control and finds… nothing. No T&S, no audio, no messages — just the standard “No cars on track” graphic. Frustrated, confused, and still half-asleep, she hops on Twitter to see if she can figure out what’s going on, but no one else is sure, either. Finally, a team PR rep thinks to pop online and say, “Morning warm-up is delayed; the medical helicopter can’t land due to fog.” The fan complains vocally on Twitter and wanders off to feed her cats with a defeated sigh.
Now, imagine instead that there had been a clear graphic explaining the delay on T&S and that IMS Radio had gone live at the scheduled session start time to provide on-the-ground updates. Would that not have been a much more considerate way to treat our poor, tired, highly dedicated race fan? (That delay fill time, by the way, would be the ideal time to discuss Ed Carpenter’s dinner, not when cars are on track and there’s data to analyze.)
It’s stunning that we even need to say this stuff out loud. But IMS Radio doesn’t exist so that the commentators can listen to themselves (I don’t think) — its only reason for being is fan outreach. It’s in IMS Radio’s best interests to examine its flaws and get its act together to better serve its listeners.
If the counter-argument to this is that IMS Radio serves both at-track and at-home listeners, by the way, then it would be worth analyzing whether the two tasks need to be split up to best serve each audience.
– Pay attention to the online community. This one is a bit self-serving, so I’ll keep it brief. Your fan base has dwindled enough that people like bloggers, forum posters, and Twitter users have far greater reach among your fan base than we would in most other sports. Many of us aren’t feeling particularly well-engaged lately. Ignore us at your peril.
– Rebuild the fan club from the bottom up. The fan club — oh, how deeply the fan club sucks!
Right now, people are being charged to be a member of the fan club and are getting very little in return — the box full of useless crap with logos all over it doesn’t count — and then they’re being charged again to do anything useful within the fan club once they’re members.
The only redeeming quality of the fan club at the moment is that it comes with a subscription to RACER that would cost roughly the same on its own, and any self-respecting IndyCar fan should probably be reading RACER anyway. But that doesn’t make it okay to rip the membership off in every other conceivable way.
Look, guys: when you’re a sport operating in the red and in a marginal position this may be hard to believe, but the fan club should not be treated as a revenue stream. It should be a method for prostrating yourself before the few dedicated fans you have left and bending over backwards to keep them engaged and invested.
Here’s one possible approach: a two-tier system. Tier one would be free to join, and it would come with less up-front swag and no RACER. But it would come with the travel and merchandise discounts, and IndyCar could introduce free passes to, say, driver meet-and-greets or pre- and post-race ceremonies — with a second pass included, of course, so that new people can be exposed to some of the more exciting aspects of the sport. If space is a concern, hand out wristbands or make it clear that there will be a cutoff at the gate. (There’s something to be said for making these perks seem exclusive.) Have a random draw for a free pace car ride at each event for someone at the tier one level. Send out a hero card to any fan who checks in at a race, just to say thank you. None of these things would cost IndyCar much money, but they would do enormous things for building goodwill, growing the dedicated fan base, and helping people share the sport with their loved ones.
At tier two, it makes more sense to charge a fee for membership and offer the RACER subscriptions, hats, paddock passes, etc. But better perks could be offered such as draws for two-seater rides, small-group breakfasts with drivers, one-on-one garage tours with engineers, pre-race grid access, tours of Race Control, and other things that would be of interest to longer-term fans. Again, the idea is to make people feel valued for caring about IndyCar, and the more they care, the more they should feel valued.
I’m sure there are plenty of other ideas out there — this is only one. But just about anything is better than what exists now, which involves fans paying a whole lot of money for next to nothing.
It’s unlikely that many of these changes will be made or the pleas heard, unfortunately — they haven’t been up until now, and there’s not much reason to believe things will change. But if the environment was right, these adjustments would go a long way toward repairing the relationship between the fan base and IndyCar. The Series needs to learn how to do right by the people it has before it will be properly positioned to bring new people in and be able to retain them.
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In the next and final installment of Fixing IndyCar, we will look at how IndyCar can tell the world about its revamped product and how we’ll all know that these changes have been effective.
In the meantime, please share your thoughts in the comments section below. How do you feel IndyCar treats you as a fan? Does the Series do anything well or not-so-well as it works to retain your interest?
Tags: Verizon IndyCar Series - Administration, Verizon IndyCar Series - Marketing
Agree wholeheartedly with you in regards to the fan club. I miss Downforce. 🙁
Steph, the video streaming we lost was just plain outrageous and backwards. And yes, it is totally due to the Hulman family’s cost cutting, as they fired that department 3 years ago. Also, good luck fixing IMS radio as long as Mike King is the anchor. He needs to be fired yesterday.
I’d assume that the fan club will be rebuilt based on recent departures from the PR group. I was too busy with other things to have been a part of Downforce, but I gathered from a few very vocal fans via Twitter that there was a “paradigm shift” that left many long-time, devoted Downforce volunteers very upset. The only consistently less-than-positive thing I heard about Randy from any fan contingent was that Downforce volunteers were convinced that he insisted the official fan club would run exclusively by Indycar employees, not “controlled” by volunteers.
I might be off by a day, but I could swear that on Thursday before Carb Day 2011, there was an Indycar-led tweetup that included a meet and greet with both Simona and Hinch with a swag giveaway, followed by the group moving over to the IMS Museum for a surprise–a one hour Q&A with Bobby Unser. (And yes, the joke was made that given it was Uncle Bobby, the one hour limit meant it might be only one question and one very extended answer!) Was there a similar one this year (because if there was, I don’t recall it)? In any case, that Q&A certainly impressed a lot of the fans who showed for the tweetup.
If ALMS and others that Indycar essentially claims to be lesser series can pull off online T&S and streaming of ontrack activity, Indycar has no excuse for not doing an even more professional job of that. An insider told me a few years ago that the major problem was no one from the IT group was allowed to go to the track early to verify the availability and bandwidth of the uplink…and when, as usual, it wasn’t found to be adequate on Thursday afternoon…”Well, hey, what ya gonna do? No time to fix it!”
I must admit that I was quite surprised that Indycar didn’t give each driver paddock passes to award to fans via twitter for the finale in Fontana as they had done for LVMS in 2011. Just as you noted, Steph…that would have been essentially a no-added-cost perk for fans that aren’t able to afford a paddock pass or wouldn’t consider buying one. One visit to the paddock gives the fan an opportunity to see things in a very different way, and I cannot imagine that anyone’s opinion of Indycar would be less after doing so! I think most of the drivers in 2011 actively engaged the fans by asking a somewhat difficult trivia question instead of just the first X number of followers to respond, and some also answered a few other questions via DM for those who won. Big win-win situation for the series and the drivers!
They seem to be trying to “revamp” the fan club every year.
last year was the first time I actually have seen some effort and some great people running it, but again, they had their hands tied for many of the plans the wanted to introduce and try out. I sensed they were going in the right direction and then once again, boom, the let go Liza Markle, who was a breath of fresh air.
Bring on another new plan for 2013…….
Then they go and lay off Liza. Maybe we need to go back to “The Crew” a bunch of us retired folks could do the job right.
I was extremely happy with my IndyCar Nation membership & thought the $35 price was a huge bargain. Seven races last year and I received 6 paddock passes, two pace car rides, a garage tour with Pippa Mann, a track walk with Peter Dempsey, and various meet and greets with Simona, Rubens, TK, Will, Helio etc, etc. All those things were included with the $35 so I’m not sure where you heard that you had to pay extra for anything worthwhile but that isn’t true. It sure made my fan experience exponentially better. Re: Downforce. I never felt welcome or valued as I wasn’t an IRLista.
Some important and interesting points to be sure Steph, with strong agreement on the T&S and IMS Radio. Correcting these critical shortcomings is critical.
The fan club thing is an area where I like some of your ideas..BUT…I do not think it sucks, in fact I think it was actually a pretty good operation for the most part. You whine it costs money; you whine about the crap logo swag and then you go on to say the Fan club should give away merchandise discounts; you whine about the need for driver meet and greets; you whine about needing spiffs like 2-seater rides etc .
Well the events I attended, there were driver meet and greets; I was awarded an IZOD logo jacket, there were several drawings for pace car rides, paddock passes, suite passes etc. I don’t know what fan club YOU belonged to, but you obviously weren’t part of the Indy Car Fan Club. Most of this costs money, and a $30 to $40 charge is really minimal.
Could the Fan Club be improved? You Betcha! The times for several promotional events were changed at the last minute; communications were hosed up (that seems to happen way too much with the IICS and promoters) and the subscription to Racer Magazine should not really be part of the package (every household that has multiple memberships got multiple issues of Racer Mag).
I think the two biggest thing IICS needs to do with the series related to your article is:
1 – Communicate internally at a much better level. The media portion (internet/radio/twittering etc.) needs to understand every schedule change and delay; every garage, on-track or pit incident; every ingress and egress change that is happening and communicate it quickly and accurately to the radio, internet, twitterers and e-mail customer.
2 – Communicate with promoters early and often. Staring a few weeks before an event and coordinate the entire event schedule so it comes off as required. No last minute surprises with juggling event schedules for midway events, driver appearances, or media events. These are fan focus items that can really frustrate attendees and ruin their experience. Imagine how people felt at TMS when they had planned their day around arriving for a pace car ride for their kid and then find out when they get there that the schedule changed and the rides were finished an hour earlier, or that the autograph session was delayed and they are going to wait in the hot sun for 3 hours before it starts… THESE are the type of problems that truly frustrate a fan.
I’m very glad to learn that some of you had positive experiences with the fan club! I know it wasn’t universal, and I still think that a free level to bait new members is a glaring omission, but thanks to those of you who shared some of the things that were going right. Losing Liza is a disappointing setback, but let’s hope that the fan club is able to carry on and keep growing for the betterment of the sport.
“People don’t pay attention to your sport to watch Pac-mans.”
I love this line.
Steph, there is a free signup for people to join the IndyCar Nation. It is the Champions Level that costs the 30 bucks.
The free signups get all of the emails from the Nation, special announcements, etc.
Yeah — you can sign up for free to learn on a regular basis about all the cool stuff you could be doing if you were paying them. Gee, thanks! 😉 (Told you someone was going to be annoyed with me — but you’re Canadian too, so I don’t have to apologize to you. 😉 )
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I agree about practically everything.
Timing & Scoring
This has never worked properly. I don’t mean that flippantly. I’ve genuinely been trying to use it for 3 or 4 years and it has never worked consistently across three consecutive weekends. It might work for one race.. then fall over or be delayed at another. I’m aware this stuff isn’t easy, but you’re right, every other series of any moderate size can do it! If this means changing timing partner, or if this means ditching the in-house system and pointing people to the timing partner’s website, then so be it.
I want to make the clear point that a live track map is a *great* idea – but why does it have to be a video feed rather than a data feed and why use such odd graphics?
IMS Radio
Oh wow I could write 1000 words on this alone. I gave up listening some time ago. I understand from your comments and from others that nothing has changed.
I think the style makes sense at Indy, particularly qualifying, but it ONLY makes sense at Indy.
They seem more preoccupied with setting up their 1950s-style handoff to the next commentator around the course. ‘Over to xxx in turnnumbertwooooo’. Just stop it! Talk normally and tell us what’s going on!
Things like Ed Carpenter’s lunch.. that talk does make sense in Friday practice, particularly early on, when teams are busy setting up cars and lap times are mostly irrelevant. It only makes sense at appropriate times, dead track time, or everyone’s slow. If things are happening we obviously need informing of them.
Covering for both at-track and at-home audiences: I can immediately think of two or three radio teams who strike this balance very well indeed. Radio Le Mans for WEC and Le Mans [and Hindy/Shaw for ALMS.com], and BBC Radio 5 Live for F1. When there’s track action and notable laptime changes they’re talked about. When people are just plugging around getting mileage they talk of the latest politics and driver market rumours and the best setup options for this track and get interviews from up and down pitlane and hello resident expert when would be a good time for everyone to switch to the soft tyres in this session?
I once watched an Indy Lights race online which had IMSRN audio – back in the days when we could do that – and they spent most of the race talking about the IndyCar race, who was going to do well, who was quick in practice, what the track conditions would be like. That wasn’t why I was tuning in!
I haven’t even mentioned the technical difficulties. Sometimes I want to follow along despite all of the things above.. but I can’t.. because it doesn’t work or the feed is too stuttery to listen to. Didn’t use to happen. Happens now.
The whole thing is just so very frustrating. And I know they can do better. They probably don’t even need to make many personnel changes (because they really do have some good people too). They just need to learn how to be more effective.
I should say.. as if I’ve not taken up enough screen space here.. that those other radio services manage to do this off one TV screen in a booth near the start line, without anachronistic corner commentators.
That leads to the other bugbear: talking as if we can all see the replay they can see. We can’t! A commentary of ‘oh, wow, look at that, that explains that one’… is entirely meaningless on the radio.
I agree with virtually everything you wrote here, Steph. See, I can be agreeable sometimes!!!
Taking your points one by one:
Timing & Scoring: To me, not having proper T&S is inexcusable. There is certainly the technology available. If the company hired by INDYCAR can’t do the job, they ought to be replaced. I-and probably others-have had more problems with this than we care to mention.
Live streaming: I do not understand this at all. NBC Sports streams Sunday Night Football-and just entered an agreement with Yahoo! Sports to stream various events carried by NBC Sports-so I don’t really get this. I understand that contracts won’t allow it, but when you are a sport carried on a network not everyone gets-or has to pay extra for as I do with my cable system-this comes across to me as being short-sighted, Particularly with young people who are more technologically savvy and less tethered to terrestrial television than an older person might be.
IMS Radio: Getting rid of Mike King-one can only wonder what dirt he has on the Hulman-George family that allows him to remain in their employ-that would solve a lot of IMS Radio issues.
Pay attention to the online community: This is a hard one. My views on the online INDYCAR community are pretty well known-some, though not all of the denziens of this community I feel are self-centered, egotistical, whiny children. If I were running INDYCAR-which I’m not-I would find it very hard to listen to these people as I find that less than half of the blog posts and comments have any redeeming intelligent value. If the posts and comments were more intelligent, maybe they would be listened to more.
I can’t address the fan club issues correctly, so I’ll refrain from commenting on that.
Memberships
There are already two levels of membership, Free and ‘Champion’.
I subscribe to the free version despite not being in the US because hey free is free. For that you get:
News – exclusive news updates & Q&As, if I’m honest I think this stuff should be available to everyone on the front page and under the /news page of the main indycar.com site, not hidden away here.
Alerts & Events – seemingly only relevant to the Indianapolis area, though there is one item for Pocono;
Offers & Experiences – a discount on an iRacing trial, and a gift membership for the Champion level.
Benefits & Discounts – more iRacing trial discounts, and 3 things I can’t use as I’m not in the US: discounts on Avis car rental, something called ‘AirMed’ (no idea), and an online store for popcorn.
There used to be a discussion board but that got replaced by a link to TrackForum.
I’ll be honest, I just logged in to it to get that list and that’s the first time I’ve been there in months, maybe April? You can see for yourself there isn’t really a reason to revisit.
Champion level is $34.95. You get all of the above, plus RACER mag, IndyCar hat, lanyard & pin, Trackside Online emails, ‘opportunities for’ garage tours & pace car rides & other stuff (it doesn’t say how you get them).
If I lived within reasonable travel of 2 or 3 races I *absolutely* would sign up, but I don’t see why anyone else should. I’m on another continent so the main hook – the stuff available at the track – isn’t applicable to me.
I’d quite like to see a middle tier, one which isn’t US-only, where I might pay say $10 and get sent a few little bits and bobs for my trouble, maybe have some discounts on things I can use – a prime candidate might be a discount for the official series online merchandise store (or free international shipping for same). I’m not asking for much more than that at the middle level. But before you do that you’d first have to have an online store that ships outside North America. shop.indycar.com is US-only, Lids is only US & Canada. If this were SCCA I’d understand it but it isn’t, this is IndyCar, a series with a decent international profile.
For much the same reasons I’d like to see the name ‘IndyCar Nation’ dropped, nothing says “we only care about US fans” more than that name, no matter how much they might politely backtrack with: ‘oh, but the IndyCar Nation is everywhere!!’ Really? Please. 🙂
Why aren’t IndyCar Nation and the online store central tenets of the indycar.com home page? The only mention is in the collection of links at the very bottom of the page.
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