Aston F1 let Glenfiddich run the funnel

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When I walked into the Aston Martin Stilt House on Sunday morning at Lummus Park, the first thing I encountered was a station handing out free coconut water.

Only sign up was from the F1 Miami app for free tickets. Scan and walk in.

I became one of the 3,000 fans the team would report came through Stilt House that day.

On my left, I hit the Glenfiddich bar, and the mechanics of the whole process become clear.

To get a coffee cocktail, I had to scan a QR code that took me to glenfiddich.rsvp/miami-trackside-experience, where I was age-gated before I could even see the form.

The form itself asked for my first name, last name, email, optional phone, date of birth that had to match my ID, US ZIP code, and a dropdown labelled "How did you hear about this event?".

There was an opt-in checkbox at the bottom that read "Yes, I want to join the Glenfiddich Collective! By ticking this box, you consent to Glenfiddich using my personal data shared in this form for email communications and the use of web tags and analytics to measure my interactions".

The footer read © 2026 William Grant & Sons Ltd. That's the mechanism worth understanding here, because it tells you something about how the partner economics actually work.

Aston Martin built the infrastructure — the brand association, the headline attendance number and their own venue space inside the larger event. The venue and the foot traffic come from the F1 promoters. Miami, in particular, is doing the groundwork to set the stage for it.

Glenfiddich ran its own conversion funnel inside it. The free coconut water just outside their booth hospitality was the top of the funnel that anyone could access, the Glenfiddich coffee was the conversion event that required the data exchange, and the CRM capture was the asset that lives well beyond race week.

The data Glenfiddich was harvesting is interesting for a beverage activation.

The ZIP code field is the giveaway — that's for downstream geographic targeting against William Grant & Sons' US distribution footprint, so they can map activation leads against their distributor map and figure out where to push trade marketing.

The attribution dropdown does the work of telling them whether the Aston Martin partnership actually drove form-fills versus people who would have shown up regardless, which means they can compare channel performance and put a real number on the sponsorship line item next year.

Most fan zones at race week capture a name and email and call it a day.

Glenfiddich was running closed-loop attribution against an ongoing CRM programme, and the Miami activation functioned as the recruitment event for the longer subscription relationship rather than as a standalone footprint.

The honest gap I have to flag here is that I went through the registration flow myself, and it took me six attempts to get past the security verification screen because the WiFi and mobile data at the beach were both crawling.

By the sixth try, I had the coffee in my hand, but a real consumer trying this for the first time during peak hours could have abandoned it earlier in the flow.

The funnel was well-designed in theory and partially broken in execution. Nobody on either side will publish the form-completion rate against the daily footfall, but the gap between those two numbers is exactly where the actual ROI calculation lives.

The shared-funnel principle scales across the rest of the partner stack, once you start looking for it.

ELEMIS had product sampling at Stilt House and the returning Pit Stop spa concept inside the Aston Martin Paddock Club suite at Hard Rock Stadium, having carried out more than 1,000 treatments across F1 Paddock Club locations globally during the 2025 season.

Throughout the week, when I couldn’t make it:

PUMA ran morning Pilates sessions inside Stilt House.

Celsius opened race week with the 2,000-participant Run Club at Pier 5, which doubled as the activation moment of the brand's new role as Aston Martin's Global Energy Drink Partner for 2026.

Each partner got tier-appropriate activations behind it, and Aston Martin got the brand association and the audience density without bearing the full cost of activating each piece independently.

That's what Rob Bloom, Aston Martin's CMO, was actually describing when he called I/AM Miami "the team's broadest set of activations yet" - the breadth was Aston Martin recruiting more partners to do their own things under the Aston umbrella.

The other layer that became visible to me once I looked at the audience flow rather than the individual events was the week-long tier sequence.

Run Club at Pier 5 was open and free, with 2,000 people, which is a mass acquisition.

Stilt House was semi-gated by the Fan Fest pass, with private RSVP-required Pilates and HIIT sessions inside for a tighter audience.

After Dark at the Aston Martin Residences Level 55 pool deck on Friday night was invite-only, far smaller and far more curated, with Glenfiddich and CoinPayments as the named hosts.

ELEMIS Pit Stop in Paddock Club on race day itself was the premium trackside tier.

Same audience, progressively qualified across five days, with each tier theoretically converting into the next.

What’s worth digging into is whether that conversion actually happens - how many Run Club participants showed up at Stilt House, how many Stilt House visitors made it onto an After Dark list, how many Paddock Club ELEMIS treatments turned into Aston Martin Performance Driving Course leads or Lagonda dealer enquiries.

The infrastructure to measure all of this exists, but I haven't found any evidence on this yet.

The thing Aston Martin is doing at Stilt House is something every team is trying to figure out a version of, because owning the venue is what lets you own the funnel.

Cadillac at Jungle Plaza in the Design District was the cleanest example I saw on the ground. They're a team without a race history yet, building US audience from zero, and they've leaned into that by giving everyone who walked in a paddock-pass-style lanyard, three free drinks, and three free food items.

The lanyard does brand work - it makes you feel like you're inside something, even though Jungle Plaza was open to anyone - and the food and drink does dwell-time work, because three of each keeps you on site for an hour and a half to two hours.

Every person there is taking photos, texting friends, and posting to Instagram, and every one of those is brand exposure Cadillac didn't have to buy media for.

Audi at MAPS Backlot in Wynwood is running a different play. I didn't get to that one personally, but the people I spoke to who did described it as sleek and intimate - smaller crowd, more curated, leaning toward the brand-as-culture positioning the Audi Revolut F1 team has been talking about with their city-wide activation strategy.

Williams was at Wynwood Marketplace for the longer-running version of the same idea, with the Atlassian-titled Fan Zone integrating Kraken's Grid Pass digital collectables and pulling on a partner stack that's been built up over multiple seasons.

What all four teams have in common is that they're paying to control the space rather than renting attention inside someone else's.

The track gives you smaller numbers and more curated relationships - which is its own commercial tier - but the city gives you scale and the right to run your own conversion funnel.

The teams that can afford to do both are doing both, and the ones that can't are choosing based on what they're actually trying to convert.

Friday morning I showed up to the stadium at 9 am. ABX ran at the track on race weekend, invite-only, format was panels plus networking, and I was in the room for it.

The lineup had Stephen M. Ross hosting as CEO and Chairman of Related Ross and Managing General Partner of the Miami Dolphins, Hard Rock Stadium and the F1 Miami Grand Prix.

Featured speakers were Stefano Domenicali (F1 CEO and President), Eddy Cue (Apple SVP Services and the new F1 broadcast partner in the US), Mary Barra (CEO and Chair of General Motors and the parent of Cadillac F1), Tom Garfinkel (Managing Partner of the Miami GP), and Zak Brown (CEO of McLaren Racing).

That lineup is the entire commercial centre of gravity of US F1 in a single room.

Apple just took the broadcast rights. GM is launching the 11th team. McLaren just won the 2025 constructors' title. F1's CEO and Miami's MD hosted.

Every meaningful US F1 commercial decision over the next two years involves at least three of those names.

The audience matched the lineup - commercial directors, investors, rights-holders - and the conversations I had between sessions were more valuable than most of what was said on stage.

I met some interesting people, and the one I liked listening to was Joe Pompliano from Huddle Up, but the broader point is that the room was full of operators who were there because the speaker lineup told them everyone else they wanted to spend a day with would also be there.

ABX got this one right. The speakers were the pull, the named draw that got the right people to RSVP yes, but the actual product was the network density of who else said yes when they saw the lineup.

The Race × Axios in Brickell ran the same mechanic at a different scale, with RSVP-gating, a one-night format, and a mixed media-and-B2B audience rather than the pure industry-decision-maker room ABX pulled together.

Dan Primack chatted to Brandon Snow, - Primack is one of the best business interviewers in the US, and I always enjoy hearing Vowles talk because he's the most consequential team principal of the post-Dorilton Williams turnaround.

Unlike other panels, the hosts tend to just agree and move on. Dan really pushed back on some of the more PR-trained answers that Brandon was giving; I would, too, in certain instances.

The data on every one of these activations almost certainly exists somewhere.

Aston Martin has internal numbers on Stilt House footfall, partner activations, and any direct conversion they tracked into Performance Driving Course leads or dealer interest.

The 3,000 figure itself comes from a company called Meshh, and the way they get to that number is worth spending time on.

Meshh runs WiFi-based spatial sensors that capture device pings as people move through a defined zone - the same platform Formula E and the NFL Draft use to measure activation footfall.

The sensors detect the periodic ping messages mobile devices broadcast as they search for networks, no app required, no opt-in, or canning anything.

Aston Martin had the sensors mounted under the show cars at Stilt House, which is a clean way of getting accurate footfall without asking anyone to do anything.

The technology gives you four metrics - unique visitors, total visits, dwell time, and journey paths through the zone.

What the 3,000 number does tell you is roughly how many devices passed the sensors on Sunday.

What it doesn't tell you is how many of those people engaged with anything.

The show cars at Stilt House were the photo magnet. Anyone walking down the beach who stopped to take an Instagram of the AMR car got counted.

So did the people who walked through the activation, drank a coconut water, didn't fill out the Glenfiddich form, didn't talk to a brand ambassador, and left ten minutes later.

The 3,000 number captures all of them. The marketing team's actual question is what fraction of that 3,000 was meaningful exposure versus drive-by car photos, and that's not something the Meshh dashboard tells you on its own.

Where Meshh is powerful is when a brand commits to multi-year measurement and starts comparing year-on-year. The ESA member spotlight from Jessica Pomfret at Meshh made this point directly - the sponsors getting the most out of the platform are the ones running it across multiple seasons of the same property, so they can benchmark this year's Stilt House dwell time against last year's, this year's journey paths against last year's, this year's repeat-visit ratio against last year's.

Meshh's separate Scorecard product extends that into industry-comparable benchmarking, which lets a sponsor argue ROI against other activations of similar scale rather than reporting a number in isolation.

A 3,000 daily footfall is meaningful if you know that comparable activations at this scale typically deliver 1,500 or 4,500. It's not meaningful if you don't.

ABX has its RSVP list and post-event data. Axios x The Race has its attendee data and the coverage it generated.

Race week is a shared user-acquisition window. The brands winning Miami own the funnel design, not the biggest budget. Aston Martin built an infrastructure that partners converted inside.

Cadillac bought dwell time with a lanyard and three drinks.

ABX put the entire US F1 commercial decision-making layer in one room.

Each one was tier-appropriate and knew what it was trying to do.

The same activation can be brilliant for one brand and a waste of money for another, depending on which tier you're actually trying to convert.