Examining The Confederate Flag Ban Impact On NASCAR Fans At Speed And Scale

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

In a post in early May, we examined whether companies should change their brand messaging in light of current events surrounding the coronavirus. We wanted to re-examine this analysis within the context of the impact that George Floyd’s death on May 25th has had both domestically and globally.

We will be using NASCAR as a framework for this discussion given an incident that happened on Sunday of this week. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The FBI and Department of Justice are investigating the discovery of a noose in the Alabama race-track garage of Bubba Wallace, the only full-time black driver at NASCAR’s highest level.”

Even though the FBI later “determined [Wallace] was not the target of a hate crime” because pull rope fashioned like a noose could have been placed in the garage as early as October 2019, this incident is worthy of a larger discussion. In particular, Wallace appeared to be targeted for championing a ban Confederate flags at NASCAR racetracks as part of “a national reckoning to combat systemic racism in the U.S.”

NASCAR instituted the ban on June 10th despite the conventional wisdom that this would likely provoke a negative reaction from many of the organization’s fans. We wanted to see whether conventional wisdom was supported by data using our Audience Inference Platform (AIP) and Social Sentiment Analysis Platform (SAP) to analyze the situation. We found that this was an issue that NASCAR fans cared about and that NASCAR has taken appropriate steps to react quickly to the situation.

AIP analyzes the organic posts of followers from specific Twitter accounts in part to determine the keywords and topics of interest to certain audiences at specific times. In particular, AIP ranks keywords that a specific audience is using as compared to a general audience. The results of our analysis from the NASCAR account on June 23rd are below.

We focused on ranking the keywords that are highlighted in yellow above as the ones that are associated with this topic. AIP found 13 keywords related to this topic all of which rated higher than “NASCAR.” This is an important benchmark because this analysis specifically focused on followers from the NASCAR account, and AIP shows that this topic is clearly of interest to these followers. 

Given that this is a topic of interest for NASCAR’s followers, we then used SAP to determine the sentiment of posts on Twitter that had the keywords “NASCAR” and “Confederate” from June 10 – June 22. We found 62,848 posts that led to 53.2 million impressions, had an average sentiment of -4.17%, and generated $313.8 thousands in value.

Since SAP scores range from -100% to 100%, this would indicate that this issue may be having an overall net negative impact. A closer examination, however, demonstrates that this is not the case. The top-rated post in terms of value and impressions is in our analysis is below:

Steve Hofstetter @SteveHofstetter

Ray Ciccarelli (0-31 in his career) has announced his retirement from NASCAR due to their decision to ban confederate flags. NASCAR is scrambling to find someone else to regularly finish 28th.It's no surprise. Ciccarelli has never been good at anything race-related.

This post originally generated negative sentiment, but it clearly contains sarcasm that shows support for NASCAR’s position. The post generated 4.5 million views and $25.3 thousand in value. More importantly, it is an example of the support that NASCAR has from the racing community on this issue.  

This also demonstrates the importance of pairing machine learning with human insights to generate the best data-driven decision making. AIP and SAP can help us answer questions around what is important to a particular audience and how they are reacting at speed and scale. Our team then can analyze the machine outputs to contextualize results even for difficult strategic issues.   

NASCAR is not currently a B6A partner nor do we know whether it used this type of analysis in formulating its decisions around this issue. There is a strong argument to be made that NASCAR should continue to take the steps it has even without data because it is the right thing to do.

However, we re-examined brand messaging in the context of current events to show how technology and data can help shape communication. First, it can help answer the question of whether a topic is of importance to a particular audience. Second, it can show how an audience is organically reacting. Knowing the answers to these questions is critical to determining how organizations such as NASCAR should best respond to these types of issues.