In this episode, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, is joined by Clay Owensby, Senior Director of Data and BI Technology at NASCAR. They dive into how NASCAR leverages advanced data analytics and digital services to enhance fan engagement and safety, modernize their data architecture with cloud solutions, and foster a deeper relationship with fans. The conversation also covers the organization's strategy for attracting younger audiences and the potential future benefits of predictive analytics and AI in delivering personalized experiences.
In this episode, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, is joined by Clay Owensby, Senior Director of Data and BI Technology at NASCAR. They dive into how NASCAR leverages advanced data analytics and digital services to enhance fan engagement and safety, modernize their data architecture with cloud solutions, and foster a deeper relationship with fans. The conversation also covers the organization's strategy for attracting younger audiences and the potential future benefits of predictive analytics and AI in delivering personalized experiences.
[00:00:00] Producer: Hello and welcome to the Data Cloud Podcast. Today's episode features an interview with Clay Owensby, Senior Director of Data and BI Technology at NASCAR. Hosted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. They discuss how NASCAR leverages advanced data analytics and digital services to enhance fan engagement and safety, modernize their data architecture with cloud solutions, and foster a deeper relationship with fans.
[00:00:30] Producer: The conversation also covers the organization strategy for attracting younger audiences and the potential future benefits of predictive analytics and AI in delivering personalized experiences. So please enjoy this interview between Clay Owensby and your host, Dana Gardner.
[00:00:44] Dana Gardner: Welcome to the Data Cloud Podcast, Clay. We're delighted to have you with us.
[00:00:48] Clay Owensby: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:50] Dana Gardner: Clay, you've said that NASCAR isn't just about selling tickets to events anymore. It's more about re-imagining what a sports league could be. What do you mean by a sports league? And tell us how you've been making the transformation from events to something much larger.
[00:01:08] Clay Owensby: Yeah, really when we think of NASCAR and going to a race, it's really buying those tickets coming to an event. But really, NASCAR's really embraced the experiential part of it and having our fans coming out and enjoying a full gamut of experiences from meeting our drivers.
[00:01:31] Clay Owensby: To being in the pits, to seeing these cars, to our amazing kids' experiences around the track. And then let's not, let's not forget the tracks themselves are just amazing spectacles to see. They're so enormous and huge and a lot goes into a NASCAR race. A lot of people, they really don't realize.
[00:01:55] Clay Owensby: The old jokes about just going around in circles. It's really a very wide range of experiences that is great for the entire family. Right. So really, NASCAR is really evolving from the ideology of coming and sitting down and watching cars go in circles to this amazing experience from these world class facilities to shaking hands with a race car driver that is just amazing.
[00:02:29] Dana Gardner: Yes, and a lot of sports tend to dwell on statistics and give you lots of ways to slice and dice your team, your driver, your favorite. But when it comes to a car, you have a real amazing high technology endpoint that's generating tons of digital data. So it seems to me that there's probably no better sport to be digitally geared toward.
[00:02:53] Clay Owensby: Yeah, you know, these machines are amazing. They really are. And the technology that goes into these machines from how you would think of a race car from just the analytics, the engine temperature, the tire pressure, all of these type of metrics. All the way to the safety ratings of the cars themselves and keeping our drivers safe as they're barreling around these tracks.
[00:03:18] Clay Owensby: Some at, on our super Speedway, is nearly 200 miles an hour, 190, 195 ish miles an hour around a track. And keeping those drivers safe is one of our top priorities. And so not only is the technology just incredible in what makes the car go, but also the technology around keeping the driver safe.
[00:03:41] Clay Owensby: Everyone in the sand safe, the pit crews, everyone around these cars, right?
[00:03:46] Dana Gardner: Yeah. So an opportunity to geek out in a big way, the technology as well as the competitive nature of the sport. Tell us how getting to these fuller set of services in your league, how does, you know, modern data analytics and the IT technology start to bring all of this together and harness it in a way that people can consume on their own terms, maybe even individualized?
[00:04:11] Clay Owensby: Yeah. And, there'll be a lot of words in this, right? In type of like data automation, BI, like a lot of things here, right? But when you really peel back the onion here and you start to think about data and what it takes to really drive these analytics, you'll, as we speak to today, I'll speak a lot about foundation, right.
[00:04:33] Clay Owensby: And the foundation is really the key. And if you, just like a house, if you can build a firm foundation, you're gonna have a strong house and just in a data architecture, right? If you can build that firm, firm foundation, just an immovable foundation that you can consolidate data.
[00:04:59] Clay Owensby: You can transform data, you can do all the things. You can then democratize data from this foundation. If you can start at that strong foundation, then sky's the limits here. So in this question, centralizing your data in a strong foundation then allows us to share the data across the many, many aspects that you just mentioned.
[00:05:25] Dana Gardner: Sure. And then of course when the fans leave the racetrack, if you can engage with them through a lot of these digital services, give them the types of geeking out that they prefer and want, then they're gonna be able to tell you more about themselves and what they want. And you can really start to have a full-time, ongoing relationship that feeds more data into the services, that creates a bond better, that then creates that virtuous adoption cycle.
[00:05:53] Dana Gardner: So it's not only a foundation, but it's innovation into a whole new set of services.
[00:05:58] Clay Owensby: Absolutely. That all bakes into that fan experience. Right? So the fan experience doesn't end when they leave the racetrack. Right. Just as you mentioned, it follows them with their mobile app to NASCAR.com and down the road to the next race.
[00:06:12] Clay Owensby: And the next race. And the next race. Right. And sitting in their living rooms, right, watching NASCAR on television.
[00:06:19] Dana Gardner: Well, let's learn a little bit more about you, Clay. Tell us about your role there at NASCAR, your background and how you got there, and how data science is important to you on seizing on these many opportunities.
[00:06:30] Clay Owensby: Yeah, so I've been with NASCAR for 10 years. I was hired here to work on our ticketing platform and have been involved in the data. I knew at that point that I was interested in data and I knew that data is really, was really the core and the foundation of everything that I was doing. So from there, grew into my role and really cut my teeth through the years of multiple iterations, learning and iterating through different formats of our enterprise data warehouse.
[00:07:04] Clay Owensby: And really, so from my standpoint, I really focus on the fan, right, and the fan data. Fan behaviors in that aspect of our company. So through the years as I started in ticketing, and it's been very heavy, heavily ticketing up until a couple years ago, but starting in ticketing, understanding those buying patterns to each of our races and following that fan through their journey to attend one of our races, to now looking at that fan holistically in their behaviors across social.
[00:07:39] Clay Owensby: Their merchandise sales. How really, how are we engaging with these fans and what is the best way to engage with these fans? Right? And looking across predictive analytics. And through the conversation really, I'm gonna talk a lot about the predictive analytics, because that's really as a company where we are holding strong on our opportunities.
[00:08:06] Clay Owensby: And that's not to say that AI is not here 'cause it certainly is and we're using it in a big way in those terms. But really our opportunities are coming in these predictive analytics and learning how and what and when and where to engage with our fans.
[00:08:30] Clay Owensby: Because that's really part of that experience is identifying that a fan is really engaging on a, let's say we have lots of different events at our, at our venues, right? We have motorcycles and cars and different series of cars, right? We have our sports car series with IMSA, and then our stock car with NASCAR.
[00:08:52] Clay Owensby: We also have motorcycles, so if someone's really into sports cars, we certainly want to engage with 'em on a sports car basis, right? We wanna make sure they have the data at their fingertips. In the case , NASCAR is on their list, their list to attend or to engage or consume. But we really wanna make sure that that experience and that personalized experience is there for our fan.
[00:09:15] Clay Owensby: So yeah, that's really been my direction here and it's shifted over the past couple years.
[00:09:23] Dana Gardner: Well, we're gonna drill in a little bit more on how you do these analytics that gives you that opportunity to be predictive and realize more opportunities. But I have to tell you, I have a little personal insight.
[00:09:35] Dana Gardner: I live within 10 miles of a major track speedway and in fact, there's a NASCAR race this weekend there. And I have to tell you, I've noticed that people start coming into the area for these, from a tremendous distance a week or so, or more in advance, and then they stay for quite a while. And it's a lifestyle.
[00:09:55] Dana Gardner: This is not just going to event. These people live this thing and they spend a lot of money and they have a lot of services and comradery. And so I just wanna make sure that our listeners and viewers understand that we're talking about a fan base. You're being the number one motor sport provider in the US and also international.
[00:10:15] Dana Gardner: You can tell us a little bit about your reach overseas, but I can't imagine another fan base quite as devoted as yours.
[00:10:21] Clay Owensby: I have never seen anything like it. I grew up in D1 athletics from a football perspective and tailgating. You show up on Saturday for your game, perhaps come into town on Friday. You set up your tailgate.
[00:10:35] Clay Owensby: That's amazing. But as you mentioned, our fans come into our racetracks and they build almost an entire city within our racetrack, and they come and they bring their campers and, to your point, they camp and they tailgate for weeks at a time. It is amazing. These fans are the most amazing fans I've ever seen.
[00:11:03] Clay Owensby: I mean, they are passionate, they are loyal, and they're really the core of our sport, right? It is really these fans that drives the sport and there is just nothing like it. If you've never been to a NASCAR race, not just in the stands, into the campgrounds. That should be on your bucket list and for all the listeners as well, it is.
[00:11:26] Clay Owensby: You will never see anything like this.
[00:11:28] Dana Gardner: So clearly given what we've just described, you've been doing something right for quite a while, but now you've got this awesome base to work with and bring them into even more of these digital activities and things like artificial intelligence and augmented reality and feeling like they're in the car.
[00:11:46] Dana Gardner: And so it's just a tremendous amount of opportunity. Tell us now a little bit about what the data architecture is that's supporting that foundation that you described that's giving you these outcomes that are just, as I say, unprecedented in sports, really. Tell us a little bit about, I think your data garage. What does that phrase mean?
[00:12:05] Clay Owensby: Yeah, so the NASCAR data garage, it was something that was coined I think six years ago now, through our conversation, again, you'll hear a lot of change. There's a lot of change at NASCAR and a lot of change to become into empower data more and more and more and more right across the board.
[00:12:23] Clay Owensby: So, six years or so ago, we had the thought that we need to really reimagine what the NASCAR data landscape is from a fan perspective, right? And how are we gonna future proof what we were doing right? And at that point, we really started with the people. The people is key here, right?
[00:12:50] Clay Owensby: The people around data is key. Then we started with the tools, and from there, really I was part of the team. I was early adopter of this team, and from there, began looking and building this people. Then the tools came in and that idea of if we build a foundation that's best in class, it's gonna last and have a vendor and a partner that's gonna grow with us and work with us.
[00:13:15] Clay Owensby: And really, so that was our strategy of finding these vendors that were going to just do that and grow. And we landed there with Snowflake being our foundation, our core, where we were gonna move, centralize our data, right? We knew that we wanted to centralize it, and we knew early on that we had an uphill battle with silos and that that was another one of those key key initiatives that was it gonna be a long-term initiative?
[00:13:43] Clay Owensby: And we were gonna challenge it. And so from there, Snowflake came on. And then all of the things around your governance, your segmentation, your democratization, your BI platforms, we really started going down the road with GrowthLoop. We chose GrowthLoop as one of the partners to grow with us, and they certainly did.
[00:14:10] Clay Owensby: And they're still here today and utilize Tableau as our BI tool. And really from there we started at a core. Right. And then have continued to evolve through those tools. No naming those tools specifically. But really just looking back in that step of going from a mostly on-prem to going through the cloud revolution of moving everything to the cloud and cloud computing.
[00:14:41] Clay Owensby: Those were our first steps because we knew that the efficiencies and the scale were there and we needed to tap into that. And, really from there, we tapped into it. And these partners that we chose at that point have been instrumental to our evolution, our growth, and where we are today. I firmly believe that we would not be nearly as far as we are today without the Snowflakes and others that helped along the way.
[00:15:16] Dana Gardner: Yeah. Again, I think NASCAR is a poster child for cloud compute because your locations shift so dramatically. And it's literally like picking up an entire city, as you say, and then plopping it down another place, hundreds of miles away, hundreds of thousands of people attending. And so, yeah. How else could you possibly do this without the cloud?
[00:15:36] Dana Gardner: But, so the data garage is your data warehouse, is that correct? Is that how I should understand it?
[00:15:41] Clay Owensby: That's correct. Yep.
[00:15:43] Dana Gardner: And so how do you improve scalability and automation? Now that you've gotten sort of that foundation and some centralization, how do you balance the good parts of centralization with the need for the decentralization and allowing that democratization of data and services?
[00:16:00] Clay Owensby: Yeah, that's a good question and that's really where we are today, honestly, just to really put it out there. Where we are today is really still in that step of breaking down those silos on a daily basis, centralizing more and more data, bringing it together and figuring out how to deliver it across our business.
[00:16:27] Clay Owensby: Because, so with the fan-facing, we also have, you know, different series with that, that need data. We have teams, we have a lot of different entities across NASCAR that see the value in this data, right? And so not only democratizing data within our walls. But then through, and of course we'll talk about what type of data that is shared through data shares and APIs and other things.
[00:17:03] Clay Owensby: But really, I'm gonna say that's really where we are today. I'm not gonna say sending data out, but we are making handshakes with our partners and with internal stakeholders of democratizing the insights that we have gathered and making the predictions through our data science and warming the business up to the idea of these predictions and the value that these predictions can bring to the company.
[00:17:37] Clay Owensby: Another topic there is a few years ago, it would take weeks and weeks and weeks to train a model and to make these predictions. But with cloud computing and Snowflake and all the tools there, I mean, we can train a model in an hour and retrieve predictions and moving into the ideology that we can begin to quickly make predictions and retrain again.
[00:18:05] Clay Owensby: You'll hear me say a lot about build, learn, iterate, because that's really where we are, is build, learn, iterate, and where we'll say, Hey, well, we got a prediction that we're not quite comfortable with. And then we start, we go back to feature engineering and we can rerun this model in an hour and say, That's exactly what we needed there and now we're good.
[00:18:31] Clay Owensby: And then we can push these predictions out across our business and begin to educate our business on what predictions can do for us and what these catchphrases of data-driven decisions and how we can, how we can really impact and influence and let's not forget the efficiencies that it brings to the people around us, right?
[00:18:57] Dana Gardner: Yeah. Clay, I’m curious when you try to bring this out to more aspects of your overall complex business, people out in the field aren't necessarily gonna be good at Boolean queries. And so are you getting also a natural language approach to how people can interact with the models that then gets more people seeking addictions and then using them?
[00:19:20] Dana Gardner: So how is the usability factor playing into the ability for your predictions to be consumed easily and well?
[00:19:28] Clay Owensby: Yeah, we're, again, we're really there and we're really looking at those tools like Cortex and seeing how we can really push some of the data points out in a format that that's easy to use and where you can go in and in natural language and ask, we went through the BI approach and the BI approach is there, and we still found that in the democratization through BI.
[00:20:02] Clay Owensby: I mean, we still found that some of our users would come to us and say, Hey, the reports are complex. I'm gonna break something. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And through education, we've managed through it. But to your point, in the outlook of pulling in a cortex to really transition to natural language where someone can come in and say, Well, hey, how many tickets did we sell to the Daytona 500 in 2025?
[00:20:33] Clay Owensby: Is a step that we are testing. We're testing with Snowflake and we're making sure that through the natural language questions that we are encompassing all of our business rules. There are a lot of business rules and there are a lot of intricacies that exist in a grandstand as you look as one for one seat.
[00:20:57] Clay Owensby: And we wanna make sure that we are following our rules. And those, I say that because, where we are looking into these natural language search engines, I read a lot that the complexities around the inventories and this type of thing in a sports language, in a stadium, that makes it difficult. And it does, and it's really going back to the people there internally that we have to work with Snowflake to make sure that we have our data structure properly to be able to answer the questions accurately. And that's really where we are in our efforts today.
[00:21:31] Dana Gardner: Yeah, and we'd like to try to identify how business outcomes benefit from these investments in analytics and warehousing. And your garage and being able to do predictive analytics and extend that out across your organization.
[00:21:46] Dana Gardner: And it seems to me that one of those business benefits is being able to identify and attract and service new segments in the market. Now, I grew up during the sixties and seventies, and so car culture was very much a part of all of our lives. But I have to tell you, my kids not so much. Right. The car just, is not as a mythical entity as it was for us when we grew up.
[00:22:11] Dana Gardner: A car was synonymous with freedom. For them, it's just a tool, but you're gonna need to get younger fans involved with NASCAR. So how can you show a business benefit through your activities in terms of attracting and getting a younger audience involved with what some of these older folks have been doing for some time?
[00:22:30] Clay Owensby: You know, with some of our data science, we have a fan score. And we really can separate out the types of fans that we are seeing in this. It's based on behaviors, right? And we have new fans, we have bucket listers, we have tap heroes, and we try to look at these types of fans that we've identified and we try to engage with them.
[00:23:00] Clay Owensby: And when I say engage, I mean how to communicate, what to communicate with those fans. And we try to stay engaged as much as our model says they want to stay engaged. With NASCAR and some of the changes we've made over the last year, we took some of our productions to Prime. And that certainly brought us a younger demographic.
[00:23:24] Clay Owensby: There we're also into the gaming area where we have some games development and we have a group that works on that and they do a great job through Roblox and our official NASCAR game. So really when I think about, you know, the attraction of that next generation of race fans.
[00:23:47] Clay Owensby: That's really, you hit on one of our north stars of the company, right? And everything that we do lends itself to identifying what that fan looks like. And as we go across all of the different mediums from social media to the gamings, to the people coming to the tracks, because certainly people come out with their children and we do the NASCAR experience and we have a kids club where the kids can come out and they sign a car and my children love it.
[00:24:23] Clay Owensby: But there's nothing like, I'm gonna go back to it, there is absolutely nothing like coming to a racetrack and bringing your children and experiencing a race. Because that is really the second you get hooked, right, is when you experience all the sight, the sounds, the feels, right, of a race.
[00:24:43] Dana Gardner: And as you've generated this great foundation and gotten into the analytics, what are some of the things maybe you've learned about that fan base? Maybe that there's so many different personas or some of the ways and reasons that people are devoted. What have you been able to learn that wouldn't have been perhaps obvious before the analytics made data science a partner with in all of this?
[00:25:08] Clay Owensby: You alluded to it earlier. I mean, being a NASCAR fan, it's a culture.They are devoted fans and they're loyal fans and they are very, very in tune with the sport. And they pick their drivers and they stick with their drivers and they come out and they enjoy the experience.
[00:25:33] Clay Owensby: And when I start thinking about analytics and things that we've found in the data that I don't know that I would've told you this, but when we see a rise in ticket sales, we've seen a direct correlation to the viewership. So it's not if an event produces more ticket sales, less people are gonna watch it.
[00:26:01] Clay Owensby: No, it's directly proportional where the more tickets we sell, the viewership is higher as well. And we're seeing this in the data and we're analyzing it. This is hot off the press to be honest, and we're analyzing this right now. And what we want to see is like, and this is another like point here in the data, is when you come to a NASCAR race, everybody has on their merchandise, right?
[00:26:27] Clay Owensby: They have their driver's merchandise on. Their Chase Elliott shirts and cowboy shirts, and everybody has on their merchandise. But what we've found is the merchandise sales, it does not correlate necessarily to attending a race. So that tells us that there's a lot of merchandise out in the world, right, that perhaps isn't showing up at our racetrack. So we've got a lot of fans out there, right, that we're engaging with. And it's amazing.
[00:26:57] Dana Gardner: So you're able to grow the pie regardless of the modality. That's an important to insight.
[00:27:03] Clay Owensby: It certainly, certainly is.
[00:27:06] Dana Gardner: We're almost out of time, but I wanted to focus in just before we go out on that predictive analytics and where you see this going as you're able to spin up this engine of data and insights and responses and extend your market and grow.
[00:27:21] Dana Gardner: Where do you see it going after that? Can we put a little bit of a crystal ball in front of you and say, When you get that agentic AI up and running and you're able to extend these analytics and use them across your organization, what sort of benefits services and, frankly, for the fans, entirely new experiences should they expect?
[00:27:42] Clay Owensby: Absolutely. So, internally, really we're looking for efficiencies across the board, right? When it comes to FinOps to our productions. The guys working through our productions. They're doing great work through in-car cameras and a lot of the aspects of feeding the data across to the television screens. They do a wonderful job there.
[00:28:06] Clay Owensby: So, that is going to continue to evolve and really there is, we're gonna go back to that word, to the experience and making the fan if they're at the race or if they're viewing it from their television in their living room, that they're sitting right next to that driver in the car, right?
[00:28:24] Clay Owensby: Getting all the same feels, the excitement that they would as if they were sitting in a race car themselves, right? So it's bringing our fans as close to the excitement as we possibly can and enhancing this experience. So from there, the sky is really the limit. AI is one of those tools like the airplane, the car, the horse that we have to figure out how we're gonna use and how it's gonna evolve and how it's gonna make us more efficient, right, in our day to day.
[00:28:55] Clay Owensby: And that's really the power of it. And we are gonna continue from a fan perspective, not only bringing them closer to being inside of a race car as we possibly can in that experience, but also delivering and engaging with them the content that they want and how they want to be engaged with, and the rate at which they want to be engaged with, right?
[00:29:20] Clay Owensby: Through social. Through email, through text, through a call. And then with all of that also comes all of the consents and the legals and all the other words that come along with it that also AI can add on and make those avenues more efficient as well.
[00:29:41] Dana Gardner: Yeah. Modulate the risk while enhancing the experience and personalizing it as best you can.
[00:29:46] Clay Owensby: You said it more eloquently than I.
[00:29:48] Dana Gardner: Well, I have to say, your story sounds like not just a good case study for sports, but for any business that's looking to take data, analyze it, use it for a business benefit internally, extend that out to their audience and create that interaction, that virtuous adoption cycle.
[00:30:03] Dana Gardner: That's the nature of growth and innovation. So congratulations on that.
[00:30:08] Clay Owensby: Thank you.
[00:30:09] Dana Gardner: Alright, well, I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. I'd like to thank our audience as well as thanking our latest Data Cloud Podcast guest, Clay Owenby, Senior Director of Data and BI Technology at NASCAR in Daytona Beach, Florida.
[00:30:23] Dana Gardner: Thank you so much, Clay.
[00:30:25] Clay Owensby: Thank you. This was amazing. Thank you so much.
[00:30:26] Dana Gardner: Yeah. We really appreciate you sharing your thoughts, experience, and expertise.
[00:30:30] Producer: Calling all developers, business leaders, IT execs, and data scientists. Snowflake World Tour is your chance to learn and network. Discover how Snowflake's AI Data Cloud can transform your career and company. Experience the future. Join us on tour. Join the Snowflake World Tour to experience the future of the AI Data Cloud with Snowflake. Hear from experts, engage in breakout sessions, and network with peers. Transform your business and career with Snowflake. Register today for one of our 23 stops worldwide at snowflake.com/world-tour.