F1 and the (non-existent) Celebrity/Athlete Marketing Divide

Athletes are celebrities.

Celebrity is an unexpectedly difficult concept to define, especially academically. There’s an entire page of my PhD thesis dedicated to this point, but we can ultimately boil it down to this: celebrities are those who attract attention in the public eye and are known by more individuals than they know in return.

There is a hesitancy in our society to refer to those in the athletic world as celebrities. It has its roots in the patriarchy, where “celebrity” could only possibly refer to something of interest to an “obsessed” girl screaming at a concert and not an…obsessed man screaming at a football game. Celebrities are vapid. Fleeting. The realm of teenage fangirls. Athletes are inspirations. Heroes. Legends. Something that creates pride for a society.

However, when you peel back the rhetoric, you’re left with the fact that – especially in non-team sports – fans want to engage with athletes in the exact same ways they want to engage with other forms of celebrity. And therein lies the key to effective marketing that drives connection, loyalty and the kind of obsession that every entertainment-adjacent marketer dreams of creating.

Celebrity fandom engagement in practice

Good celebrity fan engagement straddles the line of access and distance without making anyone feel alienated or overlooked.

Historically, athletes are not good at doing this. Athletes tend to be good at signing autographs for small children, but see other forms of fan interaction as somehow outside of their purview.

What they should all be doing is taking a leaf out of Taylor Swift’s playbook.

Taylor is one of the most famous people in the world and has a fanbase that would be willing to do almost anything she asked of them. And the power of this fanbase is thanks to the time and effort she has put into perfecting fan engagement. While this has slowed since the start of the pandemic, Taylor has historically gone out of her way to meet her fans, or to make them feel special by sending a handwritten letter or present. She knows that connection drives loyalty and loyalty drives spending, and she shows that no celebrity is ever too big to ignore that.

Team-Led Interaction

For major organisations with some of the biggest names in sport on hand, Formula 1 teams are not great at getting their drivers to engage with fans. Yes, this is true of a lot of sports, but I’m constantly surprised by the many (many!) opportunities teams are leaving on the table. This is even more true when we consider the increasing prevalence of fans following drivers, not teams. If you’re Mercedes, what are you doing to encourage your fans to stick around instead of following Lewis to Ferrari?

The Paddock

Before we go any further, this is your friendly reminder that any interaction that takes place within the Paddock – the exclusive “backstage” area where access is either by invitation or through a pass that will set you back tens of thousands of dollars – does not count as fan engagement. Okay, yes, it is a form of fan engagement, but you can’t cater solely to your VIPs and call it a day. This is the same issue many other sports face when they only offer opportunities for interaction to their season ticket holders.

You might be thinking ‘But why can’t we do that?’, and the answer is that in doing so, you’re sending the message to your fans that you only care about those with the most money and connections. Fan engagement needs to focus on all of your fans - not just those who can buy proximity.

Who’s doing it well?

Williams is the clear exception to the “poor driver interaction” rule, with their lottery-based virtual Q&A and autograph sessions placing them miles ahead of their competition. They’ve also expanded into Fan Zones in certain Grand Prix locations which also feature in-person M&G opportunities, as well as live-streamed Q&As.

I was excited to head to the Fan Zone in Melbourne to hopefully check out the M&Gs myself, but they’re being held during the day on Tuesday and Wednesday, which isn’t ideal for a) out-of-towners arriving closer to the actual race weekend, and b) those who have to…work. But that’s the team working within the constraints of a busy race schedule rather than a fixable flaw, much to my annoyance while stuck in Sydney.

What can be done better?

• More teams should be offering lottery-based and virtual meet and greets. It’s honestly baffling that most of the current teams on the F1 grid completely ignore the power of a meet and greet. Nobody is asking drivers to give up hours of their day, but powering through quick video chats with twenty fans in a half-hour session can create invaluable levels of connection. It can be the difference between a fan with vague interest and a fan willing to buy merchandise, or may even kickstart a lifetime of fan loyalty.
  

• Teams are slowly increasing their driver-focused video content, but again, only Williams seem to be actively courting fan participation. Don’t undervalue the power of reading out a fan’s name on camera!
  

• Thinking outside of the UK and Europe. As a fan in Australia, a personal pet peeve of mine is when teams don’t look past their home bases for fan engagement opportunities. Nobody is asking you to fly fans to your HQ, but if you’re limiting opportunities for interaction to fans physically close to you, you’re telling fans in other locations that they don’t matter as much. The internet exists. Asynchronous communication exists. F1 is a global sport - your fan engagement should reflect this.

Driver-Led Interaction

Almost every driver has their own fan club-esque social media update accounts. These are usually run by marketing and/or management firms and provide a one-step removed approach to updates on the relevant drivers. This is the other side of the coin to my earlier point about fans following drivers over teams. If you work for the driver, you don’t want their fans to stay with the team when they move on – you want the ultimate allegiance to be to the individual celebrity rather than the traditional sporting lifetime of loyalty to a team/club/etc. And so you need to work hard to build those connections, establish those followers, and increase your share of the fandom pie.

It’s great that we’re seeing more people get on board with this concept, but some of the attempts are far more successful than others,with a spectrum ranging from “re-shares pictures and sales links” to “nailed the brief, no notes”.

Who’s doing it well?

•  Lando Norris’ “LN4” (run by UK-based marketing agency wearegrip) is the clear standout in terms of social voice and engagement. They’ve established themselves as an account fans want to engage with because of their perceived connection to Lando. This has led to them boasting hundreds of thousands more followers across social than other driver accounts (George Russell’s OfficialGR63, for instance, has 31K followers on Twitter, while Lewis Hamilton’s Team LH has 40K).

• Alex Albon – under control of the Williams-adjacent “Fan Capital” group – has just launched a new app which I’m curious to follow. So far it appears to be pretty cut-and-paste for the fan app Williams has for itself, but there is a lot of potential here.

• I’m curious as to whether Logan Sargeant – also listed on the Fan Capital site as a customer – also has an app in the works, and what the apps will do to set themselves apart from merely acting like a news channel.

What can be done better?

While LN4 crosses the line in P1, other drivers are stuck in a slow pitstop.

The main issue these accounts face – as is the case with the teams themselves – is they see themselves first and foremost as a sales channel. What they’re missing is that fans don’t come to them to buy merchandise: they come to try and get closer to the drivers.

The best way to describe this is through a concept known as Attention Capital. Ultimately, the fan wants attention from the Driver. But that’s a difficult quest, so because attention capital flows down, they also want attention from those connected to the driver. Enter: fan clubs. When established correctly, fans view these as one step away from the Driver, and come to see them as a valuable source of attention in and of themselves. It’s a bit like six degrees of separation: if you aren’t connected to the Driver, you want to be connected to someone who is.

You can’t just create an account, start posting about merch and expect success: it involves personality, engagement from the Driver, and time and effort spent in connecting with the fans in ways they want to be connected with. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it can result in huge returns.

Returning to Taylor, through Taylor Nation she has mastered this effortless blend of sales and connection. Taylor Nation speaks to the fans in their language, provides news and access to Taylor, and gets them excited about buying everything Taylor wants to sell. This is what the drivers need to be doing, but they’re stuck on “sell”. It’s time for them to recharge their batteries, shift gears, and realise that real engagement and interaction need to come before sales.

Until we begin to see more teams understanding the value of framing their Drivers As Celebrities, there’s going to remain a disconnect between their aims and their actual outcomes.

While fan-celebrity interaction in the F1 world is not the only thing I’ll be paying attention to throughout this project, as I get ready to head to Melbourne for my annual dose of in-person F1, it’s definitely at the front of my mind right now. It’s one of the areas that feels most frustrating when looking from the outside. Research (including my own!) has shown that connection and reciprocated interaction are some of the biggest driving forces of continued fandom, and it’s so confusing to see them left on the table to make space for another newsletter spruiking a merchandise collection. Fan engagement is not sales, but the two can (and should!) work together, and I can very happily show you how!

I’m still working on a post with actual data from my tracking to-date, but today is my birthday so obviously I wanted to write 1,700 words on my favourite topic. Expect some deeper analysis soon, as well as a reflection on the Melbourne Grand Prix and on the ground fan engagement next week!