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Before getting into the activation itself, it's worth grounding who is actually pulling this off.

Esses is a 16-month-old editorial property sitting at the intersection of motorsport, culture, and lifestyle. They publish a quarterly print magazine — covers locked through issue 8, with Lando Norris on issue 3, Hadjar on 4, Gasly on 5, and Lindblad on 6.

For the Miami race weekend, they ran a distributed content operation, simultaneous race-weekend watch parties across New York, Austin, Boston, Dallas, and Portland, and an in-house creative team that commissioned illustrators, food writers, and travel writers as part of normal editorial production.

They are a media company that has figured out how to package its editorial infrastructure as a commercial deliverable.

I went to a lot of events at the Miami GP. Hospitality boxes, paddock activations, fan-facing builds, industry events, the kind of cocktail rooms where everyone has a lanyard, and nobody quite remembers the person’s name they just met.

By the end of the weekend, I had a fairly clear sense, in my own head, that activations at a destination race break into three tiers.

These are the rooms where trade press, brand strategists, and rights holder commercial teams talk to each other about the future of the sport, the state of fandom, and whatever is currently being pitched as the next big thing.

The B2B intro value is useful, the conversations are interesting, and you walk out with three new contacts in your phone.

None of this is bad. Naturally, from a fan-distribution standpoint, not all conversations will resonate. Unless it’s in some instances, when Tom Garfinkel announced the new hospitality addition to the pit straight at the ABX event. The room serves the industry, and that is its job.

This is the bulk of paddock spend at any modern grand prix. Branded photo moments, logo placement on hospitality structures, sampling stations, and the occasional driver appearance.

Fans walk through, they notice the brand, they take a picture if the moment is interesting, and they move on with their days. The activation generated brand impressions and probably hit whatever reach metric was on the brief.

What it doesn’t generate is participation, and nothing that fans feel afterwards was about the brand, because the fan was never given anything to do other than be a passive audience.

Because in my view, it is where the commercial results compound.

Fans are given an artifact. The artifact is useful for its own reasons — finding food, navigating a city, understanding something they care about — and the brand is wrapped around the artifact rather than stamped on top of it.

Fans engage with the artifact because they want to, then they post about it, and the brand inherits the distribution.

The Visa Cash App activation was a car show at Riverside Studios that drew around 1,500 people over the weekend.

1,500 people at a brand-built event during a grand prix week, in a city already saturated with paddock activations, F1 fan zones, and the GP itself competing for attention.

What made it work, in Ojus' framing, was that the show was not just cars in a hangar.

The lineup was deliberately broader than what most people associate with South Florida car culture. Donks and candy paint were there, but so were JDMs, Eurocars, and classic American SUVs. Each owner stood next to their car and walked fans through the history and the subculture behind it.

Wrapped around the cars sat a large physical timeline and an infographic breaking down the history and subgenres of South Florida car culture — donks, candy paint, JDMs, the wider scene. There was a panel discussion.

The whole thing was designed to fold narrative and aesthetics together so that walking through the room was a piece of editorial in physical form.

Wesley, a creator in the space, put out an explainer reel about donks after attending.

And he was one of a roster of creators Esses is friendly with who showed up and shared the event organically across the weekend:

Wesley Breed
Brendon Blake
Nhu Tran
Liv Blankson
Toni Cowan-Brown
Olivia Hartley
Darcey Angel
Alisha Hayes
Alexandra Green
Emma Rose Collingridge
Kyan Francis

The local Miami car community showed up, a different type of audience from the regular F1 crowd. They posted about Visa Cash App, Esses, and the race weekend, because the story being told was theirs.

A brand-built event does not normally draw in a community that has no existing relationship with the property where the event is held.

They came because the activation was built around their culture rather than around the brand's marketing calendar, and Visa Cash App got the organic distribution as a result.

That is the artifact-first logic working at full strength. The artifact in this case was not a physical map. It was a properly curated room - the cars, the owners, the timeline, the panel -that fans wanted to be in and wanted to share, because the framing of the room treated them as the subject rather than the audience.

The Puma activation was a passport, more specifically, though.

It was a physical, illustrated map of Miami, designed by Esses' creative team, with a curated list of activities to do across the city during race week. Eat the Cuban at this spot. Get the cortado here. Run South Beach in the morning. Dip your toes in the water before the gates open.

Given the nature of the city, this type of activation was more feasible to do than any other race on the calendar.

The framing was to treat the grand prix as the anchor of a longer trip rather than the entirety of the weekend. We know fans are giving up almost an entire week of work to be there.

What makes this tier three rather than tier two is that the map is useful. Esses commissioned actual food writers and Miami travel writers to build the list, and the illustrations were original.

The map worked as a piece of editorial regardless of whether you cared about Puma, and that is the whole trick.

Puma buys into an editorial infrastructure — illustrators, food writers, travel writers, creative direction — wrapped in a Puma container and distributed to Puma's influencer roster and to F1 fans on the ground.

The influencers got something fun to do. The fans got a city guide that happened to come from Puma.

Everyone who completed the passport posted the map, geotagged the locations, wore Puma in the content, and turned a single race weekend into a distributed editorial campaign that ran for days.

Looked at side by side with the car show, the same logic is doing the work. Both activations gave fans an artifact - a curated room in one case, a curated city in the other - that was useful and interesting on its own terms, with the brand attached rather than imposed.

The piece that surprised me most was the way Esses worked with the Miami GP itself.

Esses produced the official Miami GP digital event programme -embedded directly into the official race app, used by every grand prix attendee with the app installed.

It included a letter from the president of the Grand Prix, the campus map, team and driver breakdowns, and a curated Miami destination guide with original illustrations and a walking tour of South Beach.

To make it clear, this is not a partnership. Commercial regulations regarding F1 partnership inventory mean the relationship is structured as a vendor arrangement rather than a sponsorship.

That distinction is important if you are on the property side reading this.

Promoters have inventory they cannot sell as sponsorship—official programmes, fan guides, in-app editorial—but they can buy as vendor services when the deliverable is an editorial product rather than logo placement.

For Esses, the vendor route did two things at once.

It put their work in front of every attendee with the app open, which is a distribution channel most paddock activations cannot touch. And it produced a credibility artifact they can point at when selling future promoter relationships, because being trusted to produce the official programme is a different kind of signal than being sold a hospitality package.

The same editorial capability that lets them sell activation work to Puma is what makes them sellable as a vendor to a promoter. One capability, two buyer types, two different P&L lines on the buyer side.

Esses had eight core staff on the ground in Miami. Around them sat a production partner running a team of ten to fifteen, plus the usual vendor stack — AV, security, F&B, permitting, illustrators, food writers, travel writers.

The Visa Cash App car show alone brought roughly 1,500 attendees to Riverside Studios, with city street permits, custom-built walls, a stage, AV production, and a curated lineup of local Miami car owners as the storytellers.

Each of those owners stood next to their car and walked fans through the history of donks, candy paint, JDMs, and the wider South Florida car culture, alongside a large physical timeline that broke down the region's subgenres and history.

The Tag Heuer activation was a moderated conversation between Esses' editor-at-large and former F1 strategist Ruth Buscombe, framed around timekeeping, race strategy, and the role of women in the paddock — anchored to Tag Heuer's new Miami boutique and limited-edition collection.

Four partnerships, four very different deliverables, eight core staff.

The way this gets done at that headcount, from what I can see, is by sequencing the work months in advance.

Partnership planning began as early as the new year. Permits for street closures and the Riverside Studios build had to be filed six to seven weeks in advance.

The team is not heroically pulling this off in the final fortnight. They are running a continuous editorial-and-events pipeline, with Miami as one stop on a calendar that spans races later in the year.

In my view, that is the part most properties and brands miss when they try to do something similar with a one-off agency engagement.

When you slow it down, the thought process is straightforward.

Standard activations ask the fan to be an audience. Tier three activations ask the fan to be a participant, give them a useful artifact to participate with, and let the brand benefit from whatever the fan does next.

The reason an agency cannot easily produce this, in my view, is that the artifact has to be genuinely great.

A tourist map made by a brand team in a conference room reads exactly like one made by a brand team in a conference room. A tourist map made by Miami food writers and travel writers reads like editorial.

The commissioning relationships are the moat, and Esses already had them because they are a magazine. They were not building those relationships for Puma. They were renting out infrastructure they had already built for other reasons.

That distinction - renting out editorial infrastructure rather than building a one-off campaign - is the part I think team commercial directors should be sitting with.

McLaren has a content operation. Williams has a content operation. Mercedes has a content operation.

The other thing worth flagging is who actually distributed the Puma activation.

It was not Puma's owned channels doing the heavy lifting. It was the influencer roster running the passport, the F1 fans posting their completed maps, and the creators Esses already had relationships with through the magazine and its content operation.

The pattern repeats across the other Esses partnerships.

The Visa Cash App car show used local Miami car owners as the storytellers. The Tag Heuer activation used Ruth Buscombe in conversation with Esses' editor-at-large.

Each activation had named humans whose audiences became the distribution layer.

In my read, brands attaching to a tier three activation are not really buying the activation itself. They are buying access to the creators and talent that the editorial property has already built relationships with.

That is what makes it fan-forward - the activation is being carried into fan timelines by people fans already follow, rather than being pushed at them by a brand they do not.

If you run commercial at a team, it’s silly to say “go build a magazine.’

The takeaway is that your owned content operation might be under-monetised as activation infrastructure, because the default is to sell logo inventory to sponsors rather than sell editorial product as a separate line.

Your photographers, your video team, your social leads, your driver content sessions - these are the equivalent of Esses' commissioning relationships. Or if you’re the brand, work with the right media companies with a clear vision of what their editorial product is

Brands paying for activation budgets want artifacts fans engage with, and you have the infrastructure to produce those artifacts.

The question worth sitting with is whether your commercial team is structured to sell that capability as a deliverable, or whether the activation work tends to get handed to an agency afterwards.

If you are on the property side, the vendor route Esses used with the Miami GP is worth thinking about from the other direction.

What inventory do you have that cannot be sold as sponsorship - official programmes, fan guides, in-app editorial, host city content — that could be productised as a vendor deliverable instead?

Before signing your next activation contract, ask what artifact fans walk away with, and whether that artifact is useful to them outside your brand context.

If the answer is "a photo of our logo," you are buying tier two. If the answer is "something they would actually use," you are in tier three.

If you are reading this from the property side rather than the brand side, run the same test on what you are selling.