If you’d like advice to help make the most of your F1 partnership, feel free to book a call with the activations team at GroupWhistle.
Making technology sponsorships in F1 work
While they might lack the glitz of premium consumer brand sponsorships, technology businesses are ideally placed to extract the value of association from a Formula 1 partnership.
But to derive association from what is arguably the world’s most advanced technology sport requires its own specialised activation approach. As a technology sponsorship agency, GroupWhistle’s activation experts offer the following guiding principles:
1
Keep it human
Memorable stories need a human dimension, so don’t lean on inanimate tech to carry your story narrative. Find a storyteller that will permeate your audience’s consciousness – think ambassador or narrator who encapsulates your brand or tech mission.
2
Make it relatable
Tech journalists will tell you that they only file a story when a breakthrough has a reasonable chance of making it into a reader’s home or workplace in the next 12 months. It’s an important maxim for sponsorship activation to keep technologies relatable and relevant to their audiences. Avoid the esoteric and the science fiction!
3
A picture is 2,000 words
As technologies become increasingly intangible and digitised, as well as highly complex, so visual story-telling takes on even more importance. This means that animations, video and infographics are your friend and need to be at the heart of your campaigns.
4
No TLAs!
Strip technology jargon, especially TLAs (three letter abbreviations) from all of your activation communications. Keep language simple and straightforward, no matter how tempting it may be to marinade in your technical wisdom.
If you’d like advice to help make the most of your F1 partnership, feel free to book a call with the activations team at GroupWhistle.
5
The theory of relativity
Tech stories often fall foul of making indecipherable claims using big numbers (terrabytes this, or milliseconds that). For the average audience, these units of measurement are likely meaningless. Comparative measures are much more informative, for instance a mobile phone that is 120% lighter than anything that has come before makes a far more powerful statement.
6
Proxies
On a similar note, providing simple proxies can help audiences get to the substance of a story. Far better to tell someone that something weighs the equivalent of two elephants than ten metric tonnes!
7
Self-service
Tech in the absence of a net gain for humanity can very easily appear self-serving and indulgent. Ensure whatever you’re proving out in Formula 1 includes a statement of a wider social gain that can be derived from your technology in future applications.
8
Touch and feel
Many technologies come alive when seen or shown first-hand. Whether you’re targeting enterprise audiences or talking to consumers, make sure your programme incorporates on-the-ground demonstrations of your technologies in action.
Talk to us
This season, we’ve build and executed major campaigns for Formula 1 sponsors from the tech sector and helped three teams build over half a billion dollars of partner activation concepts and proposals to ensure programmes deliver.
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