There are some new faces on the Formula 1 grid this season—and not just the five rookies on teams like Mercedes and Alpine.
In addition to making changes to their driver lineups, many F1 teams spent the short offseason inking deals with brands. That included Williams Racing bringing on software company Atlassian as a title sponsor, Aston Martin signing Coinbase as an official crypto partner, and the reigning constructors’ champion McLaren Racing adding lottery operator Allwyn to its sponsor roster.
The Formula 1 organization also has several new partners, including consumer-facing brands like Lego, KitKat, and Belvedere, marking a shift in a space that’s largely known for attracting B2B and tech companies.
With US viewership of the sport having nearly doubled since 2018, it’s perhaps not surprising that brands are showing interest. But with just 20 drivers and cars on the grid, inventory is limited—making F1 competitive not only for racing teams but also for the marketers looking to capitalize on the sport’s growing popularity.
“Everyone feels like it’s a new golden era,” James Bower, commercial director for Williams, told Marketing Brew. “The audience is demonstrably changing. It’s becoming more attractive to a wider range of brands, and now we’re seeing B2C brands, luxury brands, technology brands, invest at a scale that has been rare before.”
Name game
Unlike some US leagues, which have historically considered even jerseys “sacred” real estate, F1 teams aren’t particularly precious with their naming rights. There’s only one team, McLaren, that doesn’t have a title partner.
That doesn’t mean F1 teams aren’t selective about the brands they work with. Williams takes a “less is more” approach to sponsorship, capping its partner list at around 20, Bower said, and when it looked for its title partner, the team took special care after spending five years without one. Atlassian eventually came into the picture, marking “the largest partnership in Williams history,” Bower said.
Zeynep Ozdemir, Atlassian’s CMO, told Marketing Brew that Williams stood out because of the deep role Atlassian could play in the team’s efforts to climb to the top of the grid after several difficult seasons (though its luck could be changing after the signing of F1 veteran Carlos Sainz Jr. from Ferrari). Because the team isn’t at the top, the partnership represented something of a risk, Ozdemir said, but she viewed a deeper brand involvement as more effective than a logo slap.
“Williams is actually making a lot of big moves in recent history,” she said. “To us, especially knowing what’s going on in the background and how we can help from a tech-stack perspective, that’s such an interesting trajectory. It’s a better trajectory than to just be like, ‘Oh, we’re just gonna sponsor this team.’”
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Ozdemir isn’t the only marketer who sees the upside of sponsoring an F1 team before its drivers are frequently atop the podium. OKX Global CMO Haider Rafique took a chance on McLaren years before it won the constructors’, and Coinbase VP of Marketing Gary Sun told us he wanted to partner with Aston Martin because the team, which placed fifth last year, is “positioned really well in the future.”
Cryptovertake
Beyond its limited inventory, F1 can be a hard sport for brands to break into. It’s a global sport, which means there’s a broader pool of brands vying for deals, and the inner workings can be hard to learn for sports marketers used to typical American sports, Sun said.
“The drivers move around the teams [and] brands know everyone, it’s a little bit of a family, from what I can tell, within the F1 world,” he said. “It’s very, very different from how we’ve seen other multi-team league sports operate from a partnerships perspective.”
That being said, crypto brands are laying claim to the sport. In addition to Coinbase and OKX at the team level, Crypto.com is a global F1 partner. There’s some audience overlap between F1 fans and “crypto intenders,” aka people who are open to trying cryptocurrency, Sun said, which can be attractive to brands looking to grow their user bases around the world.
It’s not just crypto companies. Bower said some brands had “potential reservations” about the sport’s typical demo a decade or so ago being “too traditional” (meaning “male, skewed older, watching on traditional, linear broadcast TV at home alone,” he said), but the sport’s audience is now about 40% women, which could be part of the reason why more B2C brands are inking deals with F1.
Brands often start with F1-level deals before looking to individual teams, Bower said, so teams could start to see interest from more consumer brands in the years to come. Already, they’re seeing windfall from the growing popularity of the sport: Williams currently has 17 brand partners, all of which joined in the past three years, he said.
“F1 transcends countries, nations, and the fan base is truly global,” Sun said. “There are very few sports and venues that actually have that type of fandom that spans across continents.”