Inside the creative process behind FOX Sports' IndyCar promos

02/07/2025 12:23 PM

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 | #INDYCARonFOXpic.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?

@AlexPalou and @CGRTeams can almost taste it. Welcome to the fastest racing on earth. #INDYCARonFOX I @IndyCarpic.twitter.com/XUUKyJYf9N

— INDYCAR on FOX (@IndyCarOnFOX) January

26, 2025

Alice Blastorah: I can relate to Alex, because to me, he is more of that reserved, introspective person, very kind, very sweet, but you can tell he’s more meticulous, thinking, very calculated. That’s why, with him, we wanted to give him a completely different flavor than Josef and really lean into those introspective parts about him, thinking about racing constantly and obsessing over it. We didn’t want to go over the top with this brazen flavor with him.

Josh Hacohen: With Josef, it was the absurdity. And in Alex, the absurdity was happening around him. We wanted to make sure that it came across that he’s a one-track mind. Alex hung out with us a lot in the video village, and that was awesome for everyone. We’re just having casual conversation and I asked him if he was a Real Madrid or Barcelona fan. He’s like, “Yeah, Real Madrid.” But then he just qualifies, after some further conversation about it, and says, “But really, I just like racing.”

Like, you gotta be the only Spaniard to be like, “I’m not even picking a side. I’m picking racing.” It’s amazing. It just felt like such a perfect example for us of, “This guy is dead set on racing. He's a one-track mind.”

Marshall Pruett: This is maybe a weird one. Were you aware, when it comes to Josef and the mentions of milk in his promo, of ABC's 2014 Indy 500 promo and the ‘Milk Gimp’ bondage piece called ‘Veins of Milk’? Because I’m watching yours, and I’m seeing him the multiple mentions of milk, and I’m like, “Oh, there’s a whole like subreddit angle here…” Did you know about it?

Alice Blastorah: Oh, we knew about it. I definitely think they were going for a shock factor there but yes, we were well aware of it, and then no comment after that!

Marshall Pruett: You've aired two of the three, so tell me about Pato and what you found there with him? Kid from Monterrey, Mexico, who spent a large portion of his life growing up in San Antonio… there’s 1000 things you can do and he will be able to serve all them.

Alice Blastorah: With him, he’s also got a very distinctive, different flavor. You can feel his passion and personality just pouring out of him. And he’s more of this daredevil type that we’ve been working through that archetype. So without giving too much away, yeah, we’re really leaning into his Daredevil-type attitude and just way of being.

Josh Hacohen: He’s like the young bad boy. It’s like Beatlemania around him. As we’re crafting larger-than-life personalities, he's already larger-than-life in terms of the entire hemisphere loves this guy. So without giving anything away, what do fans love about him? What is it about him that sends people into loving Pato? Even the IndyCar subreddit right now, everybody is just like, “Pato is coming. They’re holding Pato for the Super Bowl.” There's this anticipation, because they’re because they’re in love with Pato, and we just wanted to figure out why, and put that on display. That’s all I can say about that for now, but there’s a lot of fun stuff coming.

Hacohen says Pato O'Ward's promo was an easy one to block out: "He's like the young bad boy. It's like Beatlemania around him. As we're crafting larger-than-life personalities, he's already larger-than-life."

Marshall Pruett: Tell me about reception to your work you've seen so far with the Josef and Palou pieces.

Josh Hacohen: I just said to the agency, as we talked about this, that I've never made advertising for more a more grateful audience. It's truly incredible to see. You get a real sense of the community, first of all, in how they feed off the commercial and then each other, and how excited they are to be marketed at all, let alone marketing they enjoy. We’ve been in the business a long time. We’ve made a million ads and had a lot of big placements. So for us, we were over with looking at the comments, but when they flooded in from our partners at FOX, they sent some breakdowns and just said, “You've got to just look at this.”

It’s been a crazy few months coming up with this work. We work out of LA, and there were the fires, so it was really hard to get these made. But when it goes out in the world and you see how much it means to people, for us in advertising, it’s hard to attach your identity to something like that, because we make polarizing things. We really see a lot of good and bad comments and you don’t want to hitch your identity to that. But just seeing this and all the hard work be validated in this way — almost unanimously validated — was something you don’t see in advertising and it’s just a beautiful thing. It just makes us want to make more for this audience, to give them everything they wanted, and more.