Fan focus takes centre stage as Las Vegas hosts first F1 Business Summit

Relevance, authenticity and being ‘always on’ communicating with fans were the buzzwords as Las Vegas hosted the first ever F1 Business Summit on the eve of the Grand Prix. There was even a glimpse into a future where Formula 1 teams would replace wind tunnels with a digital twin of their race car.

The event, in the self-styled capital of entertainment and sport, featured a broad array of speakers from F1, Liberty Media, sponsors and licencing partners as well as representatives of other sports, like the Women’s’ NBA and the NFL.

F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali opened the event and set the tone. He suggested that while F1 has achieved a lot of growth in the US market, it still has a long way to go. “We need to keep listening and react. We have to be socially relevant in the US,” he said.

Domenicali spoke about how F1 is looking to increase the different ways it attracts attention and reaches new audience sectors in the US, with tactics like the Brad Pitt movie as well as partnerships with companies like Lego and Apple.

This theme was picked up by Chief Commercial Officer Emily Prazer, who described how the commercial team at F1 have learned a lot about how to engage with consumers from their licencing deals with the likes of Disney, Lego and Electronic Arts.

“Licencing has been quite an untapped category for us, we had been mainly focused on sponsorship,” she said. “We wanted to figure out how to reach the biggest possible audience; the new fans that have found the sport through Drive to Survive. But once you have that fan you have to constantly engage with them. Working with the likes of Disney and Lego has given us a lot of knowledge about how to do that. As an organisation we haven’t done that before and we are very humble to learn.”

Disney has the world’s largest licencing business, turning over $62billion a year in 180 countries. A persistent theme was the need to be ‘always on’ with storytelling and communication with the fanbase.

“The days, from a brand perspective, when you wait for the consumer to come to you are over. It really is about, ‘Are you taking the brand in interesting and compelling new ways and are you on the platforms where they’re already spending their time?’” Disney’s Tasia Filippatos said. “We are able to create compelling stories, F1 and Disney, making sure that we’re on the platforms where those consumers are spending their time. What we see consumers pulling towards today is partnerships that are authentic but also unexpected.”

After a discussion on investing in women’s sports in which Susie Wolff demonstrated that she is as skilled at panel moderation as she is at running a race series, the final panel looked at future tech. John Saw from T Mobile sketched a fascinating picture of the next wave of tech disruption he foresees in F1, due to advances in AI: “I think you will see digital twins of race cars and tracks.

“They will be more accurate than tools like wind tunnel and CFD. You’ll be able to fine tune them for weather and other external factors, while the real cars are running on track. It will be like a co-pilot for engineers. This will also really help level the playing field for the smaller teams.”

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— The Autosport.com Team