Meyer Shank Racing’s collaboration with the Grateful Dead continues this weekend in Portland for the BitNile.com Grand Prix, and if the team’s licensing efforts are successful, fans will have new merchandise to buy featuring MSR’s multiple crossovers with singers and bands like The Dead on the No. 60 Honda IndyCar Series entry.
The need to strike deals with the numerous rock, soul, and country artists who’ve adorned the car driven by Felix Rosenqvist in partnership with Sirius XM is the first stop in the process for Shank, who hopes to have a package of IndyCar-themed music items for sale on approach to December.
“We started with Carrie Underwood two years ago when she was there with us at the track – she was the first artist that we got to buy into this,” Shank told RACER. “And it’s turned into this whole thing now that that has gone way beyond what we were trying to do. These artists all have stations on SiriusXM, and for us, it’s a great way to interact as SiriusXM and IndyCar fans. Eight percent of them have come to races, and we have some really exciting ones coming after this with The Dead.
“This promotions program really gets more eyeballs on IndyCar, especially the Ozzy Osbourne car. We’ve had a lot of great cars, but Ozzy was tremendous. Now, unfortunately, we lost Ozzy, and you’ve had fans saying to bring that livery back and maybe we do that. We’re just working through the whole merchandising side of this, and there’s a lot that goes into figuring that out with the artists, so we’re looking into what we can do for some merchandising before the holiday season.”
Shank says the team’s Ozzy Osborne-themed car at Mid-Ohio generated more than three million social media interactions. Chris Owens/IMS
Rosenqvist’s tie-died car won’t be the last musical livery of the season. Beyond the team-centric attention the collaborations have drawn, Shank and his MSR partners Jim and Tim Meyer have seen huge spikes in social media traffic as fans of the various bands and acts have intersected with IndyCar in meaningful ways.
“We’ve got one more big one we’re going to announce soon, and it’s just a way to get a lot of promotion around a lot of things that we’re all doing together,” Shank said. “It lifts everybody, whether it’s one of my partners, or it’s IndyCar. Jim Meyer is an amaz ing guy and so is his son Tim, and through all of their networks and people that Jim has helped in his life, they all come back and came up with these really creative ideas, and it’s helped us on a social level.
“We’re compiling all the traffic stats, but the Ozzy content on social was over three million interactions, and even the smaller ones have been in the hundreds of thousands, which is all people who might not have known about IndyCar before they saw what we’re doing and what SiriusXM is doing in this space where we’re connecting with bands they really love.”
Shank sees the music tie-ins as a powerful promotional took to continue developing with SiriusXM as a vehicle to increase value for MSR, its other sponsors, and IndyCar where the connections with Diplo, Shinedown and Creed, and attention raised with other acts, has become one of the great success stories for the series.
“Me and Jim and Tim Meyer are all of the same mind here: We have got to do something to get massively aggressive, to get more people to pay attention to us,” he said. “And we need to get creative in new ways. If this is playing a little bit of part of that, then great. But I want to do more. We desperately need to do more to get people to know about the series.
“So I’m hopeful for the future. We’ve got to get on the gas, and we’ve got to get marketed, and we’ve got people to fall in love with us and what we’re doing in IndyCar.”
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