What $40M actually buys in F1

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DEEP DIVE

I was watching the Monaco Grand Prix highlights for research, and something struck me about the sheer density of financial services logos flashing past at 200mph. American Express. Crypto.com. Santander. Visa. Mastercard. Each of these brands is writing checks north of $40 million annually to be part of this circus.

Most people see this as expensive advertising, and yes, it is. But there is more to it than meets the eye.

You're Running a Content Creation Empire

I see right-holders operating like the world's most expensive content creator. Every race weekend, you generate hundreds of hours of premium material across multiple platforms:

• Driver interviews in motorhomes

• Behind-the-scenes garage footage that the best productions are creatings

• Hospitality moments where the world's wealthiest individuals gather thirty feet from your core product

The financial services sector has essentially colonized the space because they understand something most right-holders undersell. Providing access to a content creation ecosystem and stories that operate fifty-two weekends a year across six continents. The logo placement is just the entry fee.

What Your $40 Million Partners Are Really Buying

Walk through your paddock during race weekend and witness the real transaction happening. Those American Express cardholders sipping champagne while your mechanics change tires. Those Santander executives shaking hands with potential clients as your engineers adjust aerodynamics. These moments cannot be manufactured in their boardrooms or advertising agencies. They can only be accessed through your platform.

Your premium partners are purchasing:

• Platform infrastructure - You create environments where their highest-value customers experience something genuinely exclusive

• Association architecture - You transfer your prestige across their multiple brand touchpoints

• Content creation rights - You function like their Hollywood production team on retainer year-round

• A platform to educate - The platforms already have the attention, the brands rent that to build trust and educate on new products with new customers

The transformation happens at multiple levels.

→ Surface level: global sophistication, innovation, precision (Basically the buzzwords that every brand exec uses)

→ Deeper level: access to high-net-worth individuals and fans who follow the sport religiously.

→ Deepest level: positioning your brand within the lifestyle ecosystem of people who view F1 attendance as essential rather than entertainment. It’s renting someones audience that you won’t access to through normal channels.

Your STP as a Right-Holder

I keep thinking about Justin Moore's STP framework - Surprising Transformative Promise. The surprise comes from unique positioning that cuts through noise. The transformation focuses on concrete outcomes rather than vague brand benefits. The promise speaks directly to what the audience gets, not what you offer.

Your STP as a right-holder might be "helping premium brands access exclusive content and experiences that strengthen their customer relationships so they stop wasting marketing budget on generic activations that disappear."

Much of your partnership evaluation probably misses this layered value creation. Your sales teams obsess over reach metrics and brand lift studies, trying to distill every partnership down to a single ROI calculation for prospects. Partnership value is rarely so reductive.

You Provide Story Engine Raw Materials

You provide raw materials for your partners' story engines. When Mercedes-AMG Petronas creates content around technology transfer between their road cars and race cars, they're orchestrating their automotive engineering team with your partnership platform to produce stories that no advertising agency could manufacture. Your partnership becomes fuel for their ongoing narrative development across every brand channel.

To put it simply the eyeballs and attention is already on the track and the stories. Brands need to understand where their products, services and stories fit into the right holders.

This creator economy insight changes how you should price and position partnership decisions. You're providing access to a content creation ecosystem, complete with production infrastructure, global distribution network, and audience that money cannot reach through traditional advertising channels.

Help Your Partners Orchestrate at Scale

The orchestration challenge scales with their investment size. When your partners are spending $40 million annually, their success requires coordination across multiple teams:

• Their partnerships team coordinates with marketing on content creation

• Their fan experience team maximizes hospitality ROI from your offerings

• Their sales team leverages your exclusivity for client acquisition

• Their communications team amplifies every activation across owned and earned media

American Express integrates the F1 partnership into Centurion lounges, travel booking platforms, rewards programs, global events calendars. Every touchpoint becomes potential activation opportunity. Your partnership threads through their entire customer experience architecture.

Your job is ensuring your partnerships, marketing, fan experience, sales, and communications teams coordinate to support this level of integration.

The Alternative You Offer Smaller Partners

Smaller brands succeed on your platform when they focus intensively on specific partnership elements rather than trying to activate across your entire offering. You can help them concentrate on:

• Driver content partnerships

• Technical innovation storytelling

• Specific race weekend activations that generate disproportionate attention relative to investment

You provide the raw materials. Their orchestration capability determines what they build with them.

Your Partnership Decision Framework

The financial services cluster in F1 proves that your platform offers content creation infrastructure and audience access that justifies premium investment. These brands pay $40 million because you're providing $40 million worth of content creation capability, hospitality infrastructure, and association transfer.

Your partnership strategy determines which raw materials you can provide. Your orchestration sophistication determines the value partners extract once they've purchased that access.

Your decision framework becomes clearer when you view partnerships through this lens:

• Can you provide guaranteed access to a content creation ecosystem that operates at global scale with premium positioning?

• How do you help partners engineer breakthrough moments through creative orchestration of their investments?

The most successful partnerships happen when you match partnership offerings with partner orchestration capability. Scale partnerships require scale support. Creative partnerships require creative support.

You control the platform. What your partners build there depends on how well you orchestrate your teams to support their success.