Case Studies
Take a deeper dive into a few projects that show racer studio’s range of capabilities.
Lime Rock Park
Lime Rock Park engaged RACER Studio in June of 2021 as their agency for brand, creative and strategy. The first four months were devoted to fulfilling a slew of short term creative needs while also beginning a brand discovery journey. The process involved analyzing both the quantitative business case to meet growth objectives while also establishing the qualitative brand attributes that would serve the end fiscal goals.
With brand attributes established, we moved forward with a new brand identity that evoked the authentic and contemporary sensibilities that Lime Rock Park sought to convey, which included staying authentic to its founding purpose as a center for road racing and automotive entertainment while also having the ability to pivot toward new types of automotive events as well as non-automotive events that could take advantage of the park’s expansive and idyllic setting.
Brand identity and attributes in place, we developed an entirely new website that not only had an updated brand look, but more importantly utilized an architecture prioritizing the benefits and offerings available to drive growth.
Finally a host of new creative assets and campaigns continue to be developed across digital, print and video. This, coupled with a strong collaboration with Lime Rock’s media and social agency Sunday Group Management, has driven a near 15% increase in ticket revenue from 2021 to 2022.
The American Legion
In 2021, The American Legion, the first and largest veteran’s service organization in the U.S. embarked on a motorsports marketing campaign as an associate partner of Chip Ganassi Racing on the No. 48 car for Jimmie Johnson. What began as a simple conversation about adapting the Legions 102-year old brand for motorsports led to a much larger conversation about the Legion’s brand overall.
The Legion’s logo, called, “The Emblem” is an iconic part of the organizations fabric, dear to its 4 million members. A stately and beautiful design, created in 1919, it is ill-suited to many of marketing demands of the modern world. Getting rid of it, would not be an option. Following an extensive immersion into the Legion’s history, culture and operations, RACER Studio developed a new brand strategy.
The result is a new brand, developed for exclusively for marketing communications applications, leaving The Emblem to remain at the head of the brand hierarchy and now used only as the organization’s official seal.
Having resolved the brand communications identity issue, the next step was to create a messaging campaign to put the new brand mark front and center as well as to shine a light on the number one challenge facing veteran’s today; suicide.
With Jimmie Johnson as the brand ambassador, RACER Studio created two separate commercial spots. In “More than what you’ve heard.” some of the preconceived notions of The American Legion are dispelled while also highlighting some lesser known aspects of how the organization helps veterans across the country. The second spot, “When they came home,” raises awareness of the veteran suicide issue.
Toyota GR Supra One Lap
When the Coronavirus Pandemic took hold, it also cleaned the slate on marketing and communications plans. Toyota Racing wanted to keep their drivers engaged with their fanbase and challenged RACER Studio with the idea to have a number of their drivers across all their racing disciplines to compete in an intramural challenge. The fully-formed concept became the Toyota GR Supra Gran Turismo 1-Lap Challenge in which 16 Toyota Racing drivers used the GR Supra RZ on Sony PlayStation's Gran Turismo Sport to challenge one another for top times on preselected courses. The first portion of the challenge brought in several Toyota celebrity brand ambassadors in addition to drivers from the NASCAR Cup, Xfinity and Gander RV & Outdoors Truck Series as well as ARCA, NHRA and Formula Drift. The final portion used an elimination bracket style competition to determine a final winner, which saw 15 year-old ARCA phenom Jesse Love defeat Formula Drift superstar Frederic Aasbø.
The three week-long campaign played out across the social media platforms of the participating drivers and brand ambassadors, Toyota Racing and RACER generated 2,445,648 impressions and 63,326 engagements overall. Of those, 518,682 impressions and 25,746 engagements were delivered by RACER alone.
IMSA Book
In 2018, the International Motor Sport Association – IMSA – celebrated its 50th Anniversary season and among the various means of marking the occasion, they wanted a keepsake to last beyond the season. Following a multi-bid process, IMSA awarded RACER Studio with task of creating the official commemorative book. The only parameter was that project must deliver a book, but beyond that, the concept, format, content and design was left up to RACER Studio. It would have been easy to default to a chronological narration encapsulating 50 years of the series.
However, we chose to look at the challenge differently in order to make it as wide ranging thematically as well as to ensure that the book would be engaging from front to back. By breaking the series down into is principal parts: cars, events, drivers and history our mission was to capture the flavors and experience of IMSA through the years in order to inspire readers to conjure their own memories and reminiscences.
To finish the book, we worked with six different writers, eleven different photographers and image resources, reviewing over 20,000 images in the process. The finished book, a linen bound hardcover with dust jacket and 216 pages was limited to 2500 copies.
Toyota Reddit
For their second ever Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), Toyota wanted to up the ante from the typical text-based Q&A session to one that incorporated a series of challenges captured on video using their Tacoma, Tundra and 4Runner vehicles. RACER Studio was brought in to collaborate with Reddit devising a number of challenges that would show off different vehicle capabilities in a fun way. The Reddit audience was not only able to chat with Toyota Sr. Truck Engineer, Mike Sweers, but also to vote in real-time on which scenario they wished to see. RACER Studio developed the creative concepts, scouted and produced the filming location and directed the filming of each challenge working with leading automotive photographer and video maker, Larry Chen.
In all, nine different scenarios were filmed. Here are four of the most popular: