Time to see what Monster Energy brings to the NASCAR table

— -- Fans have seen the new series logo. Teams have replaced their windshield banners with the Monster emblem. Everyone in NASCAR seems ready for the flood of florescent green that will go along with the change from the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series to the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.

?

What a mouthful of a name and a lot to chew on, and not just because of the additional word. It feels a little clumsy. Maybe because it's new. Maybe because no one really knows exactly what Monster can do or will do as it replaces Sprint as the next sponsor of NASCAR's top division.

The brands in some ways couldn't be more different -- consider their opposite consumer spheres. Sprint sought customers who would sign cell phone contracts, which cost hundreds of dollars and for a long time required a two-year commitment. Monster seeks people to buy a drink that can cost a couple of dollars for an immediate boost.

Monster CEO Rodney Sacks has a simple explanation for why the company did the deal. It has 18 percent penetration of U.S. households, 25 percent of those households under age 35. It wants more.

According to Nielsen Scarborough, every one in three U.S. adults considers themselves a NASCAR fan, and the average age of a NASCAR fan is 48, within one year of the average age of the US population.

"We are looking to perhaps to be able to expand our age-group demographic and NASCAR were looking for us to perhaps take their age demographic down a little bit," Sacks said during a recent investor presentation.

"So really it became a good marriage between us because of what we both wanted out of it."

Estimates have the deal at $20-25 million a year for the next 2-4 years, about half of what Sprint reportedly paid during its three-year extension of its original stake, which was estimated at $70-75 million per year, for a 10-year deal. Sacks promises heavy involvement, with the potential of bringing Monster-sponsored events (from freestyle motocross to drifting) to leveraging its concert connections for fans to enjoy in NASCAR.

"We negotiated a pretty good deal, but the issue is not so much the deal that you negotiate or the TV coverage you get as part of it, or the advantage you get on the track," Sacks said.

"That is all positive. But it also was important for us to make the commitment to ourselves and to NASCAR that we are going to spend a substantial amount of time and effort and focus in actually activating at the track. ... We're going to focus on trying to make this a real win-win situation for us and to make NASCAR look pretty synonymous with Monster and synonymous with those fans."

What Sprint Did Right

Sprint achieved that as well as anyone could have imagined. Nextel replaced Winston as series sponsor in 2004 and Sprint absorbed Nextel a few years later. For 13 seasons, the cell phone carrier has worked to promote NASCAR and vice versa.

?

"Nextel from Day 1 took a very humble approach [that] we need to ask fans for permission to play in their space -- this is their sport, not ours," said Kimberly Meesters, who headed Sprint's NASCAR program over its final years. "[The attitude was] we don't want to be intruders. we want to come in and truly complement your experience, we want to be part of the NASCAR family.

?

"Clearly we want to ask them for their business but we did it at a slow pace because we wanted to make sure we were accepted as part of the family first. Nextel really wanted to earn their business and not just take it."

?

Meesters admitted that at times throughout the 13 years, the company put its brand first and the sport second. Those promotions didn't work out the best.

?

"Monster is very clear through all of their sports sponsorships -- they're not rookies in the sponsorship space and certainly not in the motorsports space. So they understand that dynamic that they're there with the fans hand in hand," she said.

?

Sprint tried to sell ?mobile-phone plans at the track, with the incentive that if fans bought a plan, they might get near the stage for driver introductions or in Victory Lane. Monster won't need that type of incentive, and obviously can do product sampling, while Sprint, by the nature of its business, couldn't just give out free cell phones.

?