Inside the creative process behind FOX Sports’ IndyCar promos
FOX Sports has made quite an impression with the first two NTT IndyCar Series driver promos that debuted in January on its NFL broadcasts. In (...)
FOX Sports has made quite an impression with the first two NTT IndyCar Series driver promos that debuted in January on its NFL broadcasts. In a great example of how a client and an advertising agency can generate meaningful products in collaboration, FOX Sports engaged the Los Angeles-based wing of the Special Group, and from within the company, creative directors Alice Blastorah and Josh Hacohen have hit home runs with the research and treatments put to use with Josef Newgarden and Alex Palou.
“I don’t want to get complacent, but I feel like we’re right in the zone, and we’ll get better,” FOX Sports marketing VP Blake Danford told RACER. “Get that core audience involved. Get them active, get them talking. Put the material in front of these huge audiences, let the core help drive, let the audiences get intrigued and curious, and then hopefully the conversations continue on social, get talking on TV and radio, and it’s a collective, right? We’ve all got to be in this together for this to really work.”
It’s the brash-and-insider-y feel in the Newgarden and Palou promos that stand out, and if you didn’t know it, you might think Blastorah and Hacohen were hardcore IndyCar fans, thankful to get the assignments for their favorite racing series, and know all the inside details.
In fact, the pair were newcomers to IndyCar; total neophytes when the project was commissioned.
There’s a third promo on its way this weekend when FOX airs the NFL Super Bowl. There’s no guarantee Pato O’Ward’s ad will run during the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles itself, which more than 120,000,000 viewers will watch, but its national debut is slated for the FOX network at some point during its daylong presentation of the country’s largest ratings generator. Palou and Newgarden are also expected to be in attendance for the game in New Orleans.
Marshall Pruett: Tell me about having IndyCar as a brand-new property to play with. I say “play with” because it looks like that; fun, inventive, but with some roots to how things have really been unique to the FOX Sports brand for so many years.
Josh Hacohen: We did a ton of research. It was getting acquainted with not just a surface level way with the sport, but really learning about the fans, the drivers, how things work, the quirks about it, what makes it different from F1 and NASCAR, and what makes it special.
Part of it was, we got really excited about what differentiated it, which was for us and our strategy department, this is the fastest (circuit) racing on Earth. That sets it apart right away. More than something like F1 or NASCAR. It felt like it came down to the human behind the wheel. And for us, we looked at that F1 Drive To Survive documentary, and just seeing how, all of a sudden, F1 took America by storm.
It was this documentary that led with the people. And if you care about the human behind the wheel, you’re going to care about the sport. And for us, we were like, there’s so much about these (IndyCar) drivers. There’s such great personalities. They’re more than marketable — they’re humans you want to get to know and not just in a five-minute Conan O’Brien interview-type thing but really get to know these little specifics about them. So for us, it was like, we don’t have an hour-long episode of a docuseries. We have 45 seconds.
We wanted to build these larger-than-life personas, because it felt like it was the way in. It felt like what got us interested. It’s all well and good to say it’s the fastest sport, and you can have a really fast montage and just talk about the sport and talk about some of the quirks of the sport, but without the humans, there’s no real connection. If you get to know the quirks behind what this person is, you’re going to care a lot more than if you learn about the quirks of the sport itself.
It was a human-first thing for us — that’s what we pitched when we first started. Our first idea we were calling it to ourselves, was “240 mile-per-hour bios” but in a way that you can catch everything and care about these drivers. We’ve all seen commercials that go too fast, and you’re like, “I don’t know what just happened in that commercial.” For us, a really big challenge was to figure out how to write in a way that when it all passes by, you go, “I might have missed some of that, but it’s great. I feel really good about it.”
Marshall Pruett: Where did you start?
Josh Hacohen: We wrote the Newgarden one first. And it just flowed out of us. It was really because we had done all the research, and with the research, we had made ourselves not just learn about the sport, but care about it and care about the people. So because we cared, it flowed right out of us. It just felt like the perfect marriage between what real fans would really care about and how to get everybody else to clue in and be like, “Maybe I will tune into the first race and just see what these guys are doing.”
Welcome to the fastest racing on earth. March 2 on @FOXTV.@IndyCar | @josefnewgarden | #INDYCARonFOX pic.twitter.com/yWFIOlDVa3
— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) January 12, 2025
Marshall Pruett: I love that recognition right off the jump for a couple of reasons. Our sport is a bit of a unicorn among the others. We have these 1500 to 2000 unique parts and pieces that come together to form the tool we use to put on our sport. It’s not a football. There’s no commercial saying, “Watch Sunday because we use a football or we swing a bat.” But we pitch these highly complex machines, and we use drivers inside them to compete and entertain. It’s a weird concept next to other sports. And it’s ultimately the people who throw the ball, catch the ball, swing the bat, or turn the wheel where we see these amazing sporting things happen.
Were you aware in your research that there’s a whole lineage here with years-long, if not decades-long complaints from diehard IndyCar fans pleading to “feature the damn drivers.” Focus on them, not the car, not the spectacle?
Alice Blastorah: I mean, I’d like to say yeah, but not knowing much about the sport, we didn’t realize there was this craving to know more about the drivers. But in our research, getting deep into the Reddit threads, into X, etc., we did understand there was more of this desire to celebrate those personalities and just seeing the amount of fandom with Pato, for instance — he has malls full of people showing up, just crying, screaming his name, huge pictures of his head. So, so we thought that was a really interesting entry point because these guys, they’re like superheroes.
They’re all extremely talented, and very good looking, so why not market that first? As we got deeper and deeper into our research, we felt like the right way forward was to lean into their personalities. We didn’t want to just do another generic bio where you could find facts that they can Google, they can Wikipedia, so we were just really leaning into the bizarre elements about them, just to build them into these legends and create these large personas, which seems to be working.
So we started crafting very specific lenses for each driver, like for Newgarden. He’s this very calculated, all-American, precise guy. He’s just absolutely precise in everything he does.
Josh Hacohen: When I read the script to him — and we didn’t have Tom Brady in the original script with Newgarden — he just said, “You know, one day I want to be Tom Brady. I want to be the Tom Brady of this sport. I look up to people like that. I’m so glad that you guys are taking the interest to market this and let me know what I can do. I can do whatever you want.” And for us, that was like, “OK, Josef is totally game for this.” He is.
And just like in the commercial, the guy wins, even when he loses. He goes, “If you wanted to make me a villain, make me a villain. I will lean into it. I will love it.” And you know what? Even if we did — which I don’t feel like we did, but if we did — he would have nailed that and been lovable in that role, too, because the guy just goes for it. So for us, it was like these guys all had their had their thing. To Alice’s point, Josef, he came in larger-than-life and was willing to do whatever we wanted. That was a huge. We already met our character.
Marshall Pruett: For him to say, “I’m all in” shows you built some trust with him. Alice, tell me about the Palou promo. He can walk down any street in America, maybe except for Indianapolis, and go unrecognized, which is a crime. How do you come up with a treatment for someone who would have his coming-out party through this promo with FOX?
