Aston's three-room playbook

I just got back from another tiring week in London during Silverstone race week, and I only went to the track on Thursday. With such a marquee event, London had no shortage of race-week activations from teams and sponsors.

Stepping back from it all, I had a conversation yesterday before I left for my flight. Do these things move the needle? The race car liveries, the activations, the house parties.

Another race team CMO I spoke to this week said marketing and activations are a series of nudges over a long period of time. It moves how a fan feels about a brand by a degree or two, and enough degrees across enough people is where this compounds.

Some nudge harder than others. The trouble is that most of them never find out where they land without relying on football counts and highlight reels of how many impressions we got in one video.

The one that moved the needle the furthest for me was Aston Martin's House Party. It worked because of a concept I kept circling all trip.

The best creative feels familiar and novel at the same time. You want a fan to recognise the shape of what's happening the second they walk in, so the idea costs them no effort to understand, and then you want to surprise them inside that comfort so it actually registers.

Lean too far either way and you lose them. Too familiar and it's wallpaper they walk straight past, too novel and it's homework they can't be bothered to do.

The design world has had a name for that sweet spot since the 1950s. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, most advanced yet acceptable, the furthest you can push a thing while a person still finds it familiar enough to accept.

Loewy was shaping locomotives and Coke bottles at the time, and the principle holds just as well for a brand experience.

Push the novelty as far as it will go, and stop the moment a fan can no longer recognise what they are looking at.

Rory Sutherland makes the same case from the other end, that the feeling a thing gives you is the actual asset, worth more than the kit it is built from, and that a fan will forgive almost anything if the experience leaves them feeling the right way.

Put those together, and you get the brief Aston somehow wrote for themselves: take an idea everyone already understands, build it in a way nobody has seen, and let the feeling carry the value.

"Welcome home" is about as familiar as a frame gets, so nobody had to decode a thing at the door. The novelty was all in what they did with it.

They took a townhouse across several floors and handed each one to a partner who dressed it as a room rather than a branded stand, put a velvet-wrapped car at the entrance, and kept their own marketing team in the building the whole time.

Valvoline had the bar in the basement, Celsius had a floor with the fridges stocked as high as your heart desired, Aston's cars and Puma took the next floors, Glenfiddich held the next, and a rooftop terrace where you could actually sit and talk.

You arrived somewhere you already understood, then found it built in a way you hadn't seen before, and there was no clock anywhere, so you set your own pace and stayed.

That pairing is what makes a thing stick after you have left. Most activations reach for the novelty on its own, a new gadget or a bigger screen or a faster sim, and forget to anchor it in something a fan already feels, so it lands as a gimmick you try once and forget.

Every time I think of a sim racing activation at an event now, my mind goes to “how long do I have to line up for”

Aston anchored first and decorated second, and the feeling did the rest.

The house was only one of three things Aston ran that week, and the set of them together is a great piece of audience thinking I saw in London.

Out at Tottenham Court Road, they built an out-of-home activation at real scale, their car parked in the middle of the footfall, handing out Celsius to anyone who walked past and asked for one.

That front is aimed at the stranger, the person coming out of the station with no thought of F1 in their head, who spots a car, a free drink, and walks off carrying a small, warm association they didn't have ten seconds earlier. No commitment asked, maximum reach, the top-of-mind mental availability they want to build.

The house in SoHo was the middle tier, built for the fan who came on purpose and for the consumer partners sharing the floors. More commitment from the guest, more depth in return, the feeling I've just spent half this newsletter on.

And I'm told they ran a third front on the Sunday, a lawn party at their factory, which sits right beside the circuit, with shuttles running guests between the two.

That one was for partners and the B2B relationships, I believe. The smallest room and the deepest, the people who actually sign things rather than just feel warm about you, but also built around a unique experience.

Three audiences, three formats, matched deliberately. The stranger gets a drink and a glance, the fan gets a house, the partner gets a lawn and a shuttle and your full attention.

Most teams pick one of those and hope it stretches. Aston built the right shape for each without letting any of them water down the others.

By the middle of the week, I'd stopped even trying to count the private events. If some of these move harder than others, which ones and by how much?

This doesn’t measure against the thing it is meant to move.

A brand builds a room, counts the footfall, posts the highlights and calls it a win, with no read on whether anyone walked out feeling a degree warmer about themselves than they walked in.

Santander was the closest thing to an exception, but that also felt flat.

They had a corner of the fan zone I couldn't quite make sense of while I was standing in it. You filled out a short brand survey, five or six questions on how you felt about the bank, and then you did a speed test for fun. Frankly, the survey questions were weak as well.

A survey and a checkbox activation sit next to each other, doing very little for each other.

The survey gives them a number on how you feel, the speed test gives you a laugh, and nothing in the middle connects the two.

It has the shape of measurement without the substance, because they are reading how you feel about a bank against an experience that was never built to change how you feel about a bank.

You can capture the attribute all you like. If the activation next to it has nothing to say, you have measured a nudge that was never loaded.

Which points do most of these have in common? They're single-player. You walk up, do the speed test or the pit-stop challenge or the sim lap on your own, get your time and leave, and it is a box ticked for the fan and a box ticked for the brand.

The formats actually winning attention right now run the other way. Look at where younger fans spend their hours, and it is YouTube game shows, Sidemen, Beast Games and that whole genre, built entirely on more than one player, on people competing and reacting to each other and the pull of not knowing who wins.

I’m not suggesting we start doing Beast Games 2.0 in the paddock or fan zone. But there is real game theory sitting under those formats with how brands build things at a race.

Williams was the most interesting case to stand in, and partly because they show the trap.

Their fan zone had a Claude activation sim-racing setup as the centrepiece, which is still, at heart, something you do on your own.

The room itself pulls real numbers, somewhere in the region of 16 to 22 thousand people across the week, Wednesday to Sunday, though it swings by city.

What struck me while I was in it was how commoditised it felt, in the retail sense.

It ran more like a well-run store than anything built for the committed fan, and a good share of the people walking in didn't look like fans at all. They were passers-by in the middle of Piccadilly Circus who clocked a busy space and wanted to know what it was.

That's no criticism, and it points to another question for the whole week: who are you actually building this for?

There's a gap between the average person who wanders in, knowing nothing about the sport, and the casual fan who makes a deliberate trip across London because they follow it enough to want the experience.

Those are two different briefs. Build for the person who knows nothing, and you keep it broad and easy and explain everything, which fills a room in Piccadilly and puts your name in front of thousands who'd never given F1 a thought.

Build for the casual who came on purpose, and you can assume some interest, go a layer deeper, and give them something they'll actually remember.

Try to serve both in one space, and you usually land in the middle, which is where a fair bit of the week felt flat.

Williams leaned towards breadth, filled the room, and got their name in front of a lot of people who never came looking for it, which, for a team rebuilding its profile, is a perfectly good use of a week in London.

So the direction depends entirely on the job. If the job is depth, push for fewer solo speed tests and more formats where fans play against each other, while the brand sits at the centre of a story worth watching and sharing.

If the job is breadth, own it fully and build the best front door in the city, rather than a deep experience quietly diluted for people who'll never use the deep part.

The rest of the week was the usual London blur that makes this trip worth doing in person. I started it in an East London studio with the Google Gemini team, which is a conversation I'll come back to in more detail.

I spent a day at The Pop-up hotel that has no business working and completely does, talking to the founder and a couple of E1 team owners about what that model is becoming, and it is good enough that I'm giving it its own issue.

So here's where I've landed on what moves the needle hardest. It is the work that knows exactly who it is for, hands that person something familiar, and then shows them something new inside it.

Aston did all of that and did it three times over, one front for the stranger, one for the fan, one for the partner.

Everything else is footfall and a highlights reel. If I ran one of these programmes, I'd spend less on the box a fan ticks and more on the room a fan remembers, I'd build a different room for each audience rather than one room meant for all of them, and I'd insist on measuring how people felt before and after something that was actually built to change it.

Next week I'll get into the livery question, because three teams repainted for Silverstone and Cadillac's is the one worth arguing about. If you were out in London last week, tell me which activation actually stayed with you. I'm building a proper view of what works, and I'd like yours in it.