Nationwide sweepstakes to gauge title sponsorship (cont'd)

For Aman, this first significant foray into activating Nationwide's sponsorship entitlement has gone well.

"Nationwide is very pleased," he said. "The coverage that Nationwide and the series has been receiving has been excellent. Our media partners have done a great job changing the name of the series to Nationwide and helping us say a little bit about why Nationwide got into the sport. Overall, we're very excited about where we are right now."

Aman said that Nationwide has run sweepstakes surrounding its sponsorship of the Nationwide golf tour, but this is the first for NASCAR. As such, response to this promotion will go a long way toward determining what kind of support the company has among NASCAR fans.

"This year, having this level of sponsorship, we're feeling our way through to see what kind of response we can get with a three-month promotion, using a highly visible, well-respected driver as part of our effort," Aman said. "We're looking for 50,000 to 100,000 people to enroll in the sweepstakes and a number of them deciding that we should be their insurance provider."

Aman said that there had been some surprises in his company's first year of series sponsorship, but none that were really big.

"Having dealt with Speedway Motorsports for the past eight years, there weren't really any surprises," he said. "What has been a surprise is, I think, the interest of the team owners and team members wanting to get to know us, learning what Nationwide was about and letting us know about the sport they love and what they want to see changed in that sport."

Harvick echoed Aman's comments.

"When they came in, everything had kind of happened last-minute, and they were very anxious to get everything activated and get their name out there," he said. "As we've gone on, the whole Nationwide team has been very active, asked a lot of questions of the teams about what we thought of the sport, working with NASCAR and where the series is going and what the series is all about. Once they got their feet on the ground, they've been very involved with the teams going forward."