IOWA | Portfolio

IOWA SPEEDWAY

BUILDING THE EXPERIENCE AROUND THE NASCAR CUP SERIES DEBUT IN IOWA

NASCAR • Iowa Speedway • 2024 - 2026

I joined Iowa Speedway in March 2024.

Three months later, the NASCAR Cup Series would race there for the first time.

The track itself wasn't new. Iowa Speedway had years of racing history, an established fanbase and a place within the state's sports culture. But the Cup Series represented something different. When NASCAR announced in later 2023 that its premier series was finally coming to Iowa, the scale of what the track was preparing for changed almost overnight.

I arrived in the middle of it.

There wasn't much time to ease in. My job was to help take a race people had been waiting years to see and build the marketing around it.

BUILDING THE FIRST ONE

My role touched nearly every stage of the marketing process.

I managed the track's overarching marketing campaign and owned the asset-management process from beginning to end: identifying needs, writing creative briefs, working directly with our graphic design team, reviewing and approving creative, and coordinating final assets across digital, social, print, promotional and event channels.

Some days that meant thinking months ahead about how Iowa Speedway should show up in market.

Other days it meant getting something to a printer.

Usually, it meant both.

I also owned our grassroots marketing initiatives, from identifying opportunities and registering for events to planning how the Speedway would show up once we got there. I led promotional-item ideation and ordering, working direction with vendors to turn ideas into physical pieces fans would actually want to take home.

And throughout the season, I worked with drivers and our communications team on appearances, school visits, content shoots, and other activations designed to bring the people behind the sport closer to the community we were asking to embrace it.

There were a lot of moving pieces.

There had to be.

We weren't only promoting another weekend on the schedule. We were helping introduce the NASCAR Cup Series to Iowa Speedway for the first time.

THEN WE GOT TO DO IT AGAIN

By 2025, the challenge was different.

The first Cup weekend had happened. We'd seen what worked, what could be stronger and just how much the event could mean to the market.

This time, I wasn't learning the scale of a Cup Series weekend while simultaneously trying to market one.

I knew what was coming.

That gave me room to push the work further and to take on more responsibility for the people helping bring it to life.

Throughout both seasons, I coordinated our promotional street team, directing the people representing Iowa Speedway at grassroots events and activations across the market. In 2025, I also supervised a marketing intern, providing day-to-day direction while giving them opportunities to take ownership of pieces of the work themselves.

At the same time, we expanded Iowa Speedway's presence beyond the track, including a physical marketing campaign throughout downtown Des Moines and grassroots activations designed to keep visible within the community.

I developed relationships with other professional sports organizations across the state, creating partnerships with the Iowa Cubs, Iowa Wolves, and Iowa Wild. Those relationships grew into dedicated racing nights with the Wolves and the Wild, giving us opportunities to introduce Iowa Speedway to fans who already understood what it meant to show up for sports in Iowa.

The idea was simple: race weekend shouldn't suddenly appear when the gates opened.

People should feel it coming.

MAKING THE WEEKEND BIGGER THAN THE RACE

That thinking also shaped the first Iowa Speedway Fan Fest in 2025.

The event brought together fans, partners, and drivers before race weekend and gave us another opportunity to build an experience about the racing itself.

That distinction became increasingly important to me during my time at Iowa.

The race is the reason everyone comes but the experience surrounding it is what gives a sports property a personality.

It's the driver appearance someone didn't expect to see. The promotional item a kid carries home. The event downtown. The partner activation. The piece of content that makes someone send the race to a friend. The school visit where a driver suddenly makes NASCAR feel more closer than something happening on television.

My work increasingly lived in those spaces.

Across two seasons, I also supported driver and media activations ranging from local appearances and social content production to larger opportunities, including working alongside our communications team on a Kyle Larson activation with Good Morning America.

Each execution looked different.

The objective underneath them was remarkably consistent: make Iowa Speedway feel present before, during, and beyond race weekend.

THE RESULTS

Across my two seasons at Iowa Speedway, our integrated marketing and communications efforts generated more than 100 million impressions.

I produced and coordinated more than 300 marketing and communications assets across email, social, digital, video, print and promotional channels.

And in both 2024 and 2025, the NASCAR Cup Series race at Iowa Speedway sold out.

Those numbers tell part of the story.

The part I remember most isn't a number.

WHEN IT BECAME REAL

There's a photograph from the first Cup weekend that I keep coming back to.

A photographer stands near the track as a Cup car disappears into its own smoke during a burnout.

By then, I had spent months looking at Iowa Speedway through briefs, creative files, promotional orders, event plans, deadlines, and lists of assets that still needed to get out the door.

Then the cars were actually there.

So were the fans.

For the first time, I got to stand insides the experience we'd spent months asking people to care about.

Iowa taught me how much invisible work sits behind a moment like that.

Hundreds of assets. Dozens of conversations. Partners, drivers, designers, printers, vendors, events, and people solving problems no fan will ever know existed.

They shouldn't have to.

They should get to walk through the gates and feel like the moment was always supposed to happen.

In 2024, I learned what it took to help build that moments for the first time.

In 2025, I learned how much further you can take it once you understand what you're building.

That's the part of Iowa I'll carry with me.

JILLIAN MURPHY