IBM's 5-day Miami playbook

Every year, the conversation around F1 Miami follows the same pattern with sponsors and activations. Which consumer brands showed up, what they built, and whether it worked.

Lego put full-scale brick cars in the drivers' parade and generated roughly $14 million in media value in a single day. WhatsApp, IWC, Alo - brands that make immediate intuitive sense at an event like this, where the eyeballs are enormous and the cultural moment is real.

You can picture the activation. You understand why they're there.

But scroll a little further down the Miami sponsor list and something shifts. Oracle. SAP. Workday. Salesforce. Enterprise software companies that sell to procurement committees and CFOs, whose names most people in that crowd at Hard Rock Stadium would not recognise.

The consumer brand story is so much more interesting to write about - is what exactly are they doing here? Is it just hosting? Is it hospitality? And if it is, how does that actually help a company whose customers are other companies?

So I went looking. Across both the 2024 and 2025 editions of the race, I tried to find what these brands actually left behind and what remained after the weekend.

For most of them, the honest answer is: not much that you can find. The ones who left something were not necessarily the ones spending the most. They were the ones who showed up with something to say.

Before getting into what happened, it's worth being clear about who was actually there - because the information going around about F1 sponsorship is messy enough that the basics are worth getting right.

A few common misconceptions to clear up:

The enterprise tech picture in Miami across both editions splits into two groups.

At the series level:

At the team level:

Most of these brands were present at Miami in some form. Almost none of them treated it as anything more than a venue.

IBM signed with Ferrari effective January 2025.

Four months later, on the morning of May 1 - Miami race weekend - IBM and Ferrari put out a joint press release announcing a reimagined Scuderia Ferrari mobile app built on IBM's watsonx platform, including an Italian-language model built specifically for the Ferrari fanbase.

The executives quoted were from both companies, the release was datelined to Miami, and the app went live that same week.

Five days later, IBM Think 2025 opened in Boston, where Arvind Krishna used Ferrari as a keynote proof point — a live customer story anchored to something that had just launched at one of the most-watched motorsport events in the United States.

The partnership became a permanent case study and a flagship reference in IBM's AI go-to-market, with a trail running from Miami to Think to sales material that is clean and entirely public.

Oracle has one of the most expensive title partnerships in F1 — the Red Bull deal is widely reported at over $100 million per year.

At Miami, Oracle hosted VIP guests in the Paddock Club, facilitated team-garage access, and generated the kind of relationship capital that hospitality at that level is designed to produce.

The technical proof points — Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enabling faster race simulations, Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications being adopted by the team — were announced in March and June 2025 through Oracle's own channels, with no public connection to Miami.

That doesn't mean Miami wasn't referenced in customer conversations or internal events that never surfaced publicly. It's entirely plausible that it was. It just means there's no visible trail, and that gap between what happens in the room and what travels beyond it is where the opportunity sits.

Salesforce has been an F1 Global Partner since 2022, and its Agentforce fan companion agent — the most substantive product story in the partnership — launched in March 2026 rather than at Miami in either year.

Event Marketer and BizBash both published comprehensive recaps of Miami activations for 2024 and 2025, cataloguing dozens of brand experiences across the venue. Salesforce doesn't appear in either.

AWS runs its F1 narrative through AWS Summit and re: Invent, with the Generative F1 campaign launching at Silverstone in July 2024 rather than at Miami.

Google Cloud and Dell are worth separating out because both of them extended the Miami story forward. The Norris win at Miami 2024 became a Google Cloud case study, and Dell brought Zak Brown on stage at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas three weeks later to carry the victory narrative into their enterprise buyer audience.

Neither anchored the story to Miami specifically, but both used what happened at Miami as material and ran with it. Which is more than most.

HP is the partial exception at the event itself. The Scuderia Ferrari HP rebrand debuted at Miami 2024 with CEO Enrique Lores on-site, and Miami 2025 produced a dedicated asymmetric livery — the first in Ferrari's 75-year history — with a fan experience at Wynwood Marketplace and matching race suits and helmets.

HP generated $26.6 million in sponsor media value in H1 2025, the highest among team-title partnerships. But HP's Miami was primarily visual — livery-led rather than built around a product story or a downstream customer conference in the same week.

One thing I specifically looked for was whether any of these companies mentioned Miami — or F1 at all — in their earnings calls or investor materials. Amazon, Oracle, Salesforce, HP, IBM, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, SAP, DHL — across Q1 and Q2 for both 2024 and 2025.

The answer is essentially nothing.

The partnerships sit below investor disclosure thresholds, and CFOs don't discuss sponsorship ROI on earnings calls. Which means the internal measurement frameworks — if they exist — are entirely private. Nobody on the outside can tell you whether any of this worked.

The hospitality approach probably works in ways nobody can see from the outside, and IBM's playbook isn't a clean indictment of Oracle's. They're solving different problems.

IBM needed Ferrari as a public proof point for WatsonX because it's still trying to convince the market that its enterprise AI story is real. Oracle doesn't need to convince anyone. Red Bull uses Oracle Cloud — it needs to keep the CIOs of three Fortune 500 companies happy enough to renew.

Those are different jobs. The trail is different because the goal is different. The same applies to series-wide partners like Salesforce and AWS, whose job is to show up across 24 races, not to anchor at one.

Where it gets harder to defend is the gap between what the biggest spenders could do and what they actually choose to do. IBM proved that a single race weekend, paired with a product launch and a customer conference five days later, can carry a brand story for a year.

That playbook is now public. The question for everyone else at this spend level is no longer whether it works. It's whether they have the appetite to do the work.

The infrastructure to tell that story is already sitting inside the sport, and AWS is the clearest example of a brand actually using it.

Ruth Buscombe spent years as a race strategist at Haas and Alfa Romeo. She has genuine technical credibility inside the sport, she's a recognisable voice to the F1 audience, and she understands the commercial and performance layer better than almost anyone currently operating as a public voice in this space.

AWS has her doing speaking gigs, LinkedIn content, and industry panels, talking about how cloud infrastructure actually changes race strategy decision-making in real time.

That story travels. It reaches the right people through a voice they already trust. A commercial director or a CTO watching Ruth explain on LinkedIn how AWS processes a million telemetry data points per second during a race is getting a proof point delivered by someone who was actually standing on the pit wall making those calls.

That's the model.

And the brands operating at this spend level - at an event locked in through 2041 and producing the single best sponsor-media-value day of the F1 season - have access to similar talent and similar platforms.

Most of them just aren't doing the work. The hospitality is fine. The story that should be coming out the other side of it largely isn't.