Senior Chief Jeff Priest was standing along souvenir row at Talladega chatting with a three-star admiral he brought with him as part of the U.S. Navy's at-track presence when a sharply dressed man in civilian clothes tapped him on the elbow.

The gentleman was a former Navy sailor in the 1970s, had done his tour of duty and then, after fulfilling his commitment, got out. The man, reminiscing of how he wished he would have extended his service, introduced Priest to his son, who had just joined the Navy and was due to ship that October as a nuclear engineer. Congratulations were exchanged and then the elephant in the room appeared.

"What made you decide to join the Navy?" asked Priest, as he most always does to new recruits.

Marketing, most executives will point to. It can determine what's working from the advertising dollars that are mandated by Congress, and a large portion of the Navy's budget was painted on a blue and yellow racecar just inside those Talladega grandstands. But who's to say it wasn't the print ads in hunting magazines? Or the television spots? Or the coveted influence of a high school friend who signed up a week earlier?

So when Priest asked the young man the question during the friendly exchange back in 2005, he didn't exactly expect to hear the answer he received.

"I saw David Stremme driving the Navy racecar and I went down and saw the Navy recruiter," the teenager told Priest.

Priest smiled.

"I grabbed him and asked him to tell that story to our three-star admiral," said Priest, who is the Navy's motorsports program manager. "He did, and the admiral just loved him; he ate it up.

"There are all kinds of stories like that happening trackside, but we don't have a tool to measure the number of enlistments attributed to exposure on the track. It's one tool in our tool bag of Congressionally mandated advertising that we do."

For some branches, it's the primary tool. But how useful is it?

That's the magic question for the four military branches involved in NASCAR team sponsorship. No metric is available to measure the direct success of something such as a NASCAR military sponsorship or how it affects recruitment. There are numbers on exposure during a race. There are television ratings. There are ratios of dollar spent vs. dollar made due to sponsorship for nearly every sticker that adheres to a racecar. But this is more than just dollars.

"The Army is not selling a case of oil or a box of peanuts or Tide or whatever -- all good products. But we're basically selling a way of life, what some call an obligation to give something back to the country," said Michael Sullivan, the U.S. Army's deputy assistant for marketing and advertising who is also responsible for the Army's recruiting efforts.

NASCAR falls under his job duties. But unless someone plainly states that they enlisted specifically due to that branch's name being on a stock car -- as the Navy recruit did at Talladega -- there's no way of fully knowing how successful that marketing tool can be. Compared with direct mail, print and television advertising, NASCAR sponsorship can be the most attractive pull. (Continued)