Picture a scantily clad young lady in a show room speaking into a low quality camera. It’s not not an inappropriate video – it was a real commercial promoting a Cup race last season. Can you think of a better way to advertise an event?

As silly as it is, I’ve been glad to see this season another rise of well produced commercials from the sport’s tracks. Bristol Motor Speedway had a commercial using actor David Keith. The guy was in “An Officer and a Gentleman”! Star power? I think so.

Charlotte Motor Speedway opted for a theme for this year’s All Star race and has been running commercials to put that on full display. While the theme and the acting have been, well, sub-par, at least the commercials look good. And they do their job – promoting an event.

Others have done a good job too actually bringing us commercials that make sense, don’t include a female in skimpy clothing, aren’t shot with a flip cam and look like they came out of multi-million dollar organizations (or in the case of their parent orgs., billion dollar organizations – I’m looking at you ISC and SMI).

In the grander scheme of things this is pretty inconsequential, but I think it’s been interesting to watch the different track strategies. It seems strange as the economy has been down some have chosen to spend less on some forms of commercial advertising at a time when they need more butts in the seats. Conventional thinking goes, when your down you do more to promote. That said, for me, the ones that aren’t doing it are almost better than the ones that are running commercials but doing a sub-par job producing them.

I don’t know about you but I’m hoping we’ve entered a renaissance for track television commercials. May we see more obscure ’80s celebrities telling us how great a race is!

So what do you think? Any favorite best and worst of race track commercials? Feel free to post links!