Sponsors don't care about a sticker on your car.

People put stickers on their things all the time. There are people carrying around Hydroflasks with stickers on them. People have brand stickers on the back windows of their trucks (I see you, “I’d rather be Cummin than Strokin’” guy.) They’ve got them on their laptops, their notebooks, their bumpers, their walls, and randomly tagged on the back of stop signs. Are these people are getting paid?  

Nope.  

They do it for free, and companies count on that when they’re handing stickers out with orders, at tradeshows, and at checkouts. Heck – WE as racers count on it when we’re handing out our own stickers in the pits and at parades. I was equal parts excited and disgusted to hear someone report to me that there’s a VDE Racing QR code sticker on the mirror in the men’s bathroom at Crandon. 

If people are willing to put stickers on display for free, why would a company pay a racer to do it? Spoiler alert: they won’t. Selling sticker space on a race vehicle hasn’t provided value to sponsors since the 90’s, and yet most of the racers I know still value their sponsorships based on how large of a sticker they’re willing to put on their car. This disconnect has resulted in underfunded race programs across all kinds of motorsports, and if we don’t correct course, we’re going to continue to bankrupt ourselves and our series’. 

What, then, is a company expecting when they partner with a racer? They’re looking for ROI, or Return on Investment. For every $1 they put in, they want to see more than $1 in value returned back to them. We’ll dive deeper into ROI in a different post at some point, but what I really want you to understand is that it’s all about money and the ways you can help a business make more of it.  

And yes – when a company partners with you, they’ll likely expect you to advertise your partnership via a sticker on your car, but that’s just a symbol of the relationship that’s happening behind the scenes – it's not the whole deal. It’s up to you to make the connection between what you do and what your sponsors’ needs are, then provide value.