I will stink until further notice

My soap is sponsored by NASCAR. I need new soap


You'd stop using soap because of a shameless corporate partnership with a sport you don't watch?


It's the principle of the thing.


There are other principles about showering, you know.


Entirely beside the point. Today's Post is a mild rant about silly partnerships and sponsorships of sporting events in general.

I don't watch NASCAR, or any sort of racing. I'm 100% certain that every NASCAR driver is a better driver than I am, and we'll leave alone the argument about whether or not car racing is a sport, and I'll just point out that I don't want to watch racing. Step 1, you drive until you have to turn left. Step 2...there's no step 2. Why do I want to watch people do this for 2 hours? Sure, they're driving faster than I would in my car, but that doesn't make me want to spend the time to watch them do it.

One of the main attractions of NASCAR is that the cars, the drivers, the pits, the pit crew, and even the post-race speeches are slathered in non-stop corporate sponsorships. Each car contains 83 separate corporate sponsor ad placements, based on a Google picture I just looked at. All of these logos are subsequently repeated on everything associated with the car, including the uniforms, and the truck used to carry the car from one race to another. (The point of this always escaped me...seems to me they could save time by just driving the cars themselves instead of loading them onto a truck...the cars are much faster.)

Anyway, the product placements tend to reverse themselves, with NASCAR logos showing up on various products that I may or may not want to buy. The fact that NASCAR wants me to buy these particular products, in lieu of other brands of the same type of thing, really has no positive impact on whether I choose that or not. If anything, I tend to steer myself away from things that are the "Official Nonsensical Product of NASCAR." Case in point, my new bottle of soap. For some unknown reason, I didn't notice this in the store, but it's got a picture of some NASCAR driver on it who wants me to buy this soap because he's got the same logo on the rear inside fender of his car. I don't really care if NASCAR boy wants me to use this particular soap. I choose it because it leaves me clean and fresh-smelling, without drying my skin like most other soaps. Now that I have to wake up every morning and see NASCAR while I'm in the shower, I may have to reconsider my association with this particular product.

As a bit of an aside, for your amusement, I've compiled a list of pretty nonsensical NASCAR sponsors (ie: Things that have little if anything to do with driving a car in circles). Enjoy!

• Coca-Cola - Official Non-Alcoholic Beverage
  
• Coors Light - Official Beer
  
• Freescale - Official Automotive Semiconductor
  
• Gillette - Official Shaving Product
  
• Mars - Official Chocolate Bar, Official Cheese-Filled Snack, AND Official Pet food
  
• Nabisco - Official Cookie
  
• Old Spice - Official Deodorant
  
• Sirius XM Radio - Official Satellite Radio (Seriously? There's only one Satellite radio company in existence)
  
• Sunoco - Official Convenience Store