McLaren hid Smartsheet's logo

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This case study is based on exclusive interviews and internal documentation from the SponsorX campaign. For partnership strategy insights delivered to your inbox, subscribe to The Commercial Table.

What does commercial growth in motorsport look like when the smartest move is not to add your logo to a car but to pay a million dollars to take it off? That was the starting point for Smartsheet, a company that wanted to build brand awareness in Australia and the UK. On paper, it sounds absurd. You’re sponsoring one of the most recognizable teams in Formula 1, and the plan is to not show your name? Try explaining that to a CFO.

But that question—how do you grow commercially in a saturated space without becoming wallpaper—drove Smartsheet’s strategy.

Formula 1 cars are covered in logos the way a teenager’s laptop is covered in stickers. Every square inch is branded. You can be the 20th logo on a sidepod and vanish faster than a driver’s excuses after a bad qualifying session. For Smartsheet, just slapping a logo on McLaren’s car would have been like whispering in a nightclub. Nobody was going to notice.

So they flipped the playbook. They paid for the space, but instead of filling it with their own name, they gave it to 4 different nonprofits across two race seasons who never would’ve had access to the F1 stage. The visual was striking: McLaren racing at 200 mph with a nonprofit logo where a tech company’s should be. It looked like a glitch in the system. And that glitch made people stop, squint, and ask questions. Which is exactly the point of good marketing.

The campaign idea was simple. The execution was not. Smartsheet had close to 100 stakeholders over a dozen areas of expertise workstreams involved. That meant PR, social, content, paid media, internal comms, sales enablement. McLaren, F1, nonprofits, agencies, and internal teams—all moving at different speeds.

Approvals became their own endurance race. McLaren had its process. Smartsheet had its urgency. Then McLaren itself added “pass-through rights,” which sounds like wizard law from Harry Potter but is really just an extra hoop to jump through when you want to put someone else’s name on your space. The approval chain stretched to 15 weeks.

If you’ve ever tried to organize a wedding, imagine that—only half the guests live in different time zones, the band insists on pre-approving the cake, and the venue occasionally calls to remind you that the chairs are owned by a third party. That was SponsorX.

The only way to survive this was to centralize everything in their own technology, Smartsheet. Smartsheet created a single point of contact—a kind of sponsorship traffic controller—who kept everyone aligned. Without that role, the campaign would have looked less like a partnership and more like corporate Whac-A-Mole PR stunt.

Each group had clear targets.

This was not a campaign built on luck. It was logistics, messaging, and careful design wrapped around one bold idea.

Smartsheet followed a blunt budget philosophy: spend at least as much on activation as on the sponsorship itself, or don’t bother sponsoring. Renting the space without doing anything with it is the marketing equivalent of buying a Ferrari to sit in traffic.

Plenty of brands fall into that trap. They buy the space, celebrate the press release, then vanish because they never funded activation. The result? A logo that blends into the background and a marketing team quietly hoping the CFO doesn’t ask about ROI. Smartsheet avoided that fate.

So, they invested.

The creative message tied it together: “Empowering meaningful change.” That phrase carried through every workstream, from content to hospitality to press.

The numbers delivered.

The campaign proved sustainable across two race seasons, with strategy and targets shifting for each activation as the team learned what worked. What resonated with audiences in the US didn't translate directly to the UK—they discovered this through testing, not assumptions.

SponsorX works because it solves the problems that sink most sponsorships.

At first glance, SponsorX looked like a gimmick: pay money to remove your own logo. But the gimmick was just the doorway. Underneath, it was careful planning, stakeholder management, and disciplined execution. It worked because the creative spark was backed by process.

Commercial growth in motorsport often depends on this balance. You need a sharp idea that gets attention, a clear constraint that forces creativity, and an operational framework that ensures delivery.

Smartsheet’s SponsorX campaign is a reminder that growth is about finding the story that makes people care, then doing the work to make it real. Commercial growth looks less like plastering your name everywhere and more like using the platform to tell a story people actually remember.

Planning 2026 and want a SponsorX-grade playbook? I can introduce you to the operator behind this case study. DM “SPONSORX 2026” with markets + decision timeline. (serious, budgeted inquiries only).