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Follow the Money: How Formula One Sponsorships Reveal Cultural Shifts · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  Brake Fix's History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part
• 0:04
  by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the
• 0:07
  Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of
• 0:11
  Commerce, and the Argettsinger family.
• 0:16
  Follow the money.
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  Formula One's financial support as cultural indicator.
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  By Elton G McGowan, Elton Skip McGowan is an emeritus professor of finance at
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  Bucknell university and a former visiting professor of the university of Montenegro.
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  He has presented and published on both finance history and automobile
• 0:34
  history and culture and served as area chair of the vehicle culture section
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  of the popular culture association.
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  Skip examines formula one on track and on vehicle sponsorships through the post
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  world war two period to show the evolution of the cultural appeal of the series.
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  The title of this presentation is Follow the Money, which is a very
• 0:54
  familiar investigation approach.
• 0:57
  You know, if you really want to know what's going on beneath the surface.
• 1:02
  follow the money.
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  My observation has been that within motor racing, at least one
• 1:08
  transaction that appears to be ubiquitous is pay and display.
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  So on the one hand, you have companies providing racing groups with some
• 1:18
  form of compensation and exchange.
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  They're allowed to display their name.
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  It's impossible to believe that anyone isn't aware of this phenomenon.
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  Had they not closed the blinds, you could either look at this slide, or
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  you could look out the windows and see numerous banners and billboards.
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  Now, what's interesting about this are a couple of things.
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  First is, if you look at historic photos from the French Grand Prix
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  of 1908, there are billboards.
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  And there have always been billboards at races.
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  If you look at what's on the billboards, okay, so this is a Formula One event.
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  You have an advertisement for a shipping company, DHL.
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  You have a large international bank, UBS.
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  You have an insurance company, Allianz, and it looks here like you even have
• 2:17
  a consumer electronics and appliance company, LG, none of which appear to have
• 2:23
  any direct connection with the company.
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  Motor racing.
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  And in fact, I have to admit, I've been looking out the
• 2:28
  window since I've been here.
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  And I can't figure out what go bowling has to do with motor racing either.
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  Another location for advertising now is on a tire.
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  This was apparently a relatively recent phenomenon.
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  I mean, we had billboards and banners for a long time.
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  And it took quite a while before we started seeing anything like this.
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  And it appears to have started out, and this is based upon just looking
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  over some historical photos, with just a small name on the chest.
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  Kind of like, I think, Eric was wearing yesterday with Pirelli.
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  And then it seems that it's evolved into something that's pretty
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  extraordinary from a fashion point of view or a functional point of view.
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  I'll go back to this.
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  And I noticed Eric is kind of following this trend this morning.
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  I noticed at least two, Mobile and Porsche.
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  Finally, what everyone has observed after it became legal in the late
• 3:28
  60s, we see the logos and names on the automobiles pretty much everywhere
• 3:35
  it's possible for them to be.
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  And again, as with the attire.
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  It's a little hard to imagine just what the point of something like that is.
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  You know, it's clearly not something that could ever be
• 3:47
  seen from any sort of distance.
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  The location of these advertisements really does pose
• 3:53
  some interesting questions.
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  Why do companies do this?
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  Obviously, they think that they must be obtaining some sort of benefit from it.
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  What are the potential benefits that a company might receive from these displays?
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  The obvious one is kind of a traditional marketing benefit, attract new customers.
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  Without having interviewed the folks at Martini and Rossi, this was one
• 4:16
  of the earliest consumer products to be advertised in Formula One.
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  And one of the assumptions, or at least part of my speculation, first of all,
• 4:25
  they're an alcoholic beverage company.
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  Perhaps they assumed that the audience for Formula One consisted of people
• 4:32
  who drank alcoholic beverages.
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  You know, which may not be an inappropriate stereotype at the time.
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  However, they weren't drinking their alcoholic beverages.
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  Perhaps they thought that by advertising in Formula One, they could convince
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  some of those folks in the stands to give a different drink a try.
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  Okay, so attracting new customers.
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  A second, more or less traditional marketing rationale
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  is to retain current customers.
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  It's very difficult for me to believe that anyone in the audience for this Formula
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  One event did not know about Red Bull.
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  and had not already made a decision whether to drink Red Bull or not.
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  However, you can imagine that maybe what Red Bull is looking for in something like
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  this is that if the folks in the audience are fantasizing taking the checkered
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  flag, you know, standing on the podium, even though they don't have the car,
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  they could have a can of Red Bull and that this can of Red Bull becomes part
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  of this image, part of this fantasy.
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  And maybe they might have more than one, hopefully not so many that
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  they're going to have heart seizures.
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  Now, I took a look at Google Scholar to see if any work had been done in
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  this area and it appeared to me that most of what people have written about
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  has been more or less traditional.
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  You look at sponsorship of Formula One, you see if revenue increased,
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  if the stock price increased, if brand awareness increased.
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  It was very, very conventional.
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  I think there are different benefits from something like this that perhaps explains
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  some of the questions I posed earlier.
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  Now I'm calling this social benefits, and if you want to kind of summarize
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  this in a smaller phrase, it's the opportunity to hang with the cool kids.
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  So you sponsor a Formula One team, you know, you get to shake hands
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  with the drivers, you get to pose for pictures with them, you get invited
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  to attend the receptions, okay, there are certain benefits to that.
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  These benefits might be for you personally.
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  Keep in mind, I mean, these are companies.
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  Presumably they do have to answer to investors.
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  But of course, this is an opportunity to take clients and customers along with you.
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  And something like this would be very, very impressive.
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  And I use this as an example.
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  I don't know if any of you have heard of Footwork, but Footwork
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  was a Japanese logistics company.
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  And like some of these other sponsorships that you see, it's really hard to see any
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  really direct connection with Footwork.
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  Formula One racing, but on the other hand, you can imagine that the
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  customers of footwork would be fans of racing and would be interested in
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  going to these events and having their photos taken with the principles.
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  Another benefit, and I may be.
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  Mistaken in referring to this as political benefits.
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  But the idea is that there's something else going on, not necessarily related
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  directly to business activities.
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  Early on, there was certainly a very significant nationalism
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  component to racing.
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  So you could see in a situation like that, an Italian company might
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  want to be showing its patriotism or its political commitment by
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  advertising at an event like that.
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  or advertising on a vehicle in that event.
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  Another one, and this occurred to me when I was watching the films on Thursday
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  night, you know, we had the Sprint cars with a lot of advertisements on
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  them of companies I had never heard of.
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  And I thought, well, maybe it's kind of a way for the company to show
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  its kind of more personal support.
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  For a customer, okay, so that they're willing to donate in a way to their
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  venture and not just sell them a product.
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  Of course, you could also look at this as being kind of a product discount as well.
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  But the reason I've used Parmalat here is that Parmalat is an Italian,
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  I believe, dairy products company.
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  And again, you're thinking like, you know, what's the connection?
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  And I think maybe at this time a Parmalat was trying to become a conglomerate.
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  They wanted their name to be known to potential investors,
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  you know, when they're looking to finance their acquisitions.
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  So this is a way of getting their name out there.
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  That may seem a little elusive, but I'll explain a little more in just a second.
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  And another one, and I think this is becoming increasingly important,
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  is the idea of brand image.
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  So we have The company Palantir, which as near as I've been able to figure
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  out, is a data mining company trying to extract something from large databases.
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  I've never heard of their name in conjunction with motor racing.
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  Usually Palantir is associated with the Department of Homeland
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  Security, with a central intelligence agency, but here they are.
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  Talent here.
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  Ferrari team partner.
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  Interestingly, two days ago I was looking at the CNN website and there was an
• 9:32
  identical banner on the website to this.
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  Same photo, same everything, different company.
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  But again, a technology company.
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  One thing that I've looked at in the past is the importance
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  of making something tangible.
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  Humans deal with physical objects.
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  And obviously a company like Palantir is intangible.
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  And I'm wondering if making the technology association with Ferrari gives them
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  some sort of visual substance or visual picture to their clients and customers.
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  Let me digress just a little bit.
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  I had a friend from Germany visiting a week ago, and I told him I was
• 10:13
  coming up to the conference and he said, Oh, what are you going to do?
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  And I'm making a presentation and I told him about the presentation.
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  So he told me a story.
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  My friend is with a German biotech company in Munich.
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  This biotech company, it's very small, it has a very specialized product.
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  What they produce are delivery systems for drugs.
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  You know, drugs can't all be administered in the form of a pill.
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  It can be a very, very.
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  very difficult process to get the chemical into the body
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  and get it to the right place.
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  And this is what his company does.
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  So, the customer for his company are drug companies.
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  So, they hire this company to develop delivery systems for their
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  new experimental drugs, which is really way far removed from anything
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  individuals are familiar with, and certainly far removed from sport.
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  Now, he was able to use company money to make a contribution to a
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  participant in a race called, and I think it's called Funderglob.
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  It's a solo around the world sailing race.
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  That occurs every four years.
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  One of the reasons I think he made this contribution from his company,
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  he obviously had the influence to do this, is that he's a sailor.
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  So he kind of liked the idea.
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  But the other reason is, Fond du Globe, I understand, is largely a
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  French So most of the contestants are French, but it's held every four years.
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  And four years ago, a German contestant participated and did
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  really well, apparently ended up in the top five out of about 30.
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  And this got huge publicity within Germany.
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  And he thought it might be good to sponsor this race because another German who
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  was from Bavaria was going to compete.
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  What's interesting is I don't know that he anticipated the consequences, but
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  one thing that happened is that as a result of the sponsorship, his company's
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  representative in France, was invited to a reception where she was photographed
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  with the German contestant in this race.
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  And this photo ended up prominent in German media.
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  You know, saying, okay, here's a representative from Sirion Biotech.
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  So, that answered my question as to what the point of all those
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  things on the jackets were.
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  Is it so when someone gets photographed with a driver, they can see on the
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  driver the logo for their company.
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  Now, the other interesting thing about this story about my friend is
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  that at the time They were in the process of kind of selling themselves.
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  They were looking for a larger company to take them over.
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  And what he found was their association with this race
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  turned out to be significant.
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  Potential acquirers that they were talking to thought it was pretty cool that the
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  company was associated with this race.
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  And the thing is, you never know what people are going to bond
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  over or what's going to be an interesting topic of conversation.
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  So rather than having to talk about antibodies, they were able to talk about
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  I'm going to talk a little bit about sail racing, that story that he told
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  me really gave me some insights into what might really be going on here,
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  that this association can have very valuable, yet very indirect benefits,
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  so that all of those little logos.
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  on the car are not going to be visible to customers if any customer ever cares about
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  them, but they provide other downstream benefits that can be extremely valuable.
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  I thought, well, it seems as if there's an evolution of sponsorships and advertising.
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  It's kind of gone through a series of changes.
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  Originally, racing was an important means of advertising the automobiles themselves.
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  But what I found to be interesting here is that in the 1950s, that
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  really wasn't so much the case.
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  Maybe it was because the cars had deviated so much from anything that
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  people could actually purchase.
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  So if you look at photos from Formula One cars from the 1950s,
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  I saw only two, maybe three.
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  that had a logo, and it wasn't very prominent.
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  You know, Mercedes had the star, Maserati had the trident in the grille,
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  and I think I saw a Ferrari logo.
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  The only other thing was, you could spot the Gordinis by the shape of the grille.
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  They weren't really advertising the car so much, but as you can tell from
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  the billboard in the background, most of the advertising had to do with
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  various sorts of automotive products.
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  Petroleum products, tires, spark plugs, those sorts of things.
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  The next stage was really Tobacco advertising.
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  Now, I think there were two reasons for this.
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  One reason is there were fewer and fewer places where tobacco
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  was allowed to be advertised.
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  And in fact, in some cases, it wasn't even allowed to be
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  advertised on the automobiles.
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  In some countries, tobacco companies are looking for a
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  place to advertise their product.
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  Here's where the stereotypes might come in.
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  You know, I mentioned before, stereotype that maybe the Formula One audience
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  at the time Well, maybe there was also a stereotype that the Formula One
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  audience at the time was more likely to smoke than the general population,
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  whether that was accurate or not.
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  So they had to find someplace to advertise.
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  They chose this possibly because of the audience and also because they were able
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  to paint the car to look like their pack of cigarettes, which was pretty exciting.
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  And I don't know of any cigarettes that were green.
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  Then As Formula One apparently became more popular and had a much broader audience,
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  you started seeing advertisements for generic consumer products.
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  And by generic, I mean did not necessarily appeal to a unique market segment.
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  That pretty much most people would be in the market for this sort of thing.
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  You know, most people would be out and thinking about
• 16:30
  purchasing a camera, for example.
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  Then from there, It kind of moved more into upscale products.
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  They were targeting what would probably consider maybe more wealthy people.
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  Okay, so you see HSBC advertising.
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  You see WorldCom advertising.
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  Again, I'm not sure at the time how many of WorldCom's products actually
• 16:52
  were under the name WorldCom.
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  People purchase cell service.
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  People purchase telephone service.
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  I don't know if they know about WorldCom.
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  And I don't know much about beer.
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  I always associated BEX with being a little cut above.
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  This was not bug.
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  So we see them advertising more upscale consumer products.
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  And then, of course, what we see nowadays is astonishing, is
• 17:14
  advertisements for technology companies.
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  And again, you can maybe make an argument that these were
• 17:20
  suppliers in some form or another.
• 17:22
  I'm not so sure.
• 17:23
  Okay, so in this case, you do see Palantir.
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  You see Amazon Web Services.
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  I looked some of these up, you know, one was like a Swiss cloud computing company.
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  Okay, so these are companies you'd pretty much for the most part never
• 17:36
  heard of, kind of like Syrian biotech.
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  So I saw this as being kind of a progression of products that were
• 17:44
  being sponsored and wondered what the connection was between that and the
• 17:50
  audience, or at least that and the company's perception of the audience.
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  So do the changes in sponsorship correlate with changes in the
• 18:00
  Formula One audience and kind of the cultural position of Formula One?
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  I thought, well, let me see if I can quantify that in some way, and honestly,
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  I don't know if I had, but what I was able to do was find a Wikipedia site
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  where someone had looked at every Formula One team, and by year, they had the
• 18:22
  constructor, and that's how it was listed.
• 18:24
  Then they identified what they called, at various places,
• 18:27
  the main sponsor, the delivery sponsor, or the principal sponsor.
• 18:31
  And then they had a list of all the secondary sponsors, which
• 18:35
  obviously was pretty extensive.
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  So I thought, well, let me see who was committed enough to be a main sponsor
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  for three or more consecutive years.
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  In other words, they really believed in something enough to
• 18:49
  really make a financial commitment.
• 18:51
  And then what I did was I looked through and tried to classify them by industry.
• 18:56
  Take a quick look at who the sponsors were.
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  Now, in automotive, there weren't many, where there was some sort of automotive
• 19:04
  automobile or automotive product associated with a different constructor.
• 19:10
  Now, I'm guessing that there's probably a pretty close connection between Stewart
• 19:14
  and Ford and between HRT and Cosworth.
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  This is the one where there's probably no connection.
• 19:19
  And I'm thinking maybe Infinity was willing to sponsor Red
• 19:23
  Bull because there was no other automotive name associated with it.
• 19:28
  Some of the other categories, these are the ones where the constructor
• 19:32
  was also the principal sponsor.
• 19:35
  On the one hand, you can see where the automobile company itself, obviously,
• 19:39
  tremendous resources, is its own principal sponsor, Alfa Romeo, Honda,
• 19:45
  Lotus, Mercedes Benz for a time, Renault, and some of the others, you
• 19:50
  can see, you know, some of the more Are less well known constructors.
• 19:55
  Apparently couldn't get another sponsor.
• 19:57
  So ended up being the principal sponsor themselves.
• 19:59
  Here we have the consumer electronics sponsorships.
• 20:03
  Now again, the idea is principal sponsor three or more consecutive years.
• 20:09
  General consumer products.
• 20:11
  And it doesn't appear to be any particular product category here.
• 20:15
  It's quite a wide variety of companies, you know, many of which I never heard of.
• 20:20
  Financial companies.
• 20:22
  Call this oil and chemicals.
• 20:23
  Actually, most of it's petrochemicals.
• 20:25
  There are a few.
• 20:26
  I think this is a kind of a sugar company.
• 20:30
  I think Corto's, you know, is more diversified products.
• 20:34
  But, you know, notice most of them are petrochemicals.
• 20:36
  Technology companies.
• 20:38
  Tobacco companies.
• 20:39
  And here you can see, like, Marlboro, for example, sponsored in a wide variety
• 20:44
  of teams for extended periods of time.
• 20:46
  And, like, Imperial Tobacco was there for Gold Leaf, but then was
• 20:50
  there for John Player Specials.
• 20:52
  You know, there was some sort of break between these, so they didn't
• 20:56
  sponsor for a while, and then did.
• 20:59
  transportation companies or logistics companies.
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  So what?
• 21:04
  I'm not even going to try to necessarily make sense.
• 21:07
  You can look at these and you can see if this really can have any connection.
• 21:12
  Obviously, this was very preliminary, okay?
• 21:15
  So, most of them, constructors, tobacco and petrochemicals, We're the largest
• 21:20
  sponsors, then you move into kind of consumer products, and now later into
• 21:26
  technology and transportation, the average beginning for these terms was
• 21:31
  highest for tobacco and general consumer products, and then oil and transportation,
• 21:37
  and later on financial technology.
• 21:40
  More recent phenomenon and finally length of sponsorship.
• 21:45
  I kind of thought this was interesting is that consumer products tended to stick
• 21:49
  with team for the longest period of time, but tobacco was pretty loyal constructor.
• 21:55
  It seemed to me that, you know, you would finance yourself until
• 21:58
  you could find someone else to provide the principal sponsorship.
• 22:01
  So as I said, I'm not sure if these numbers really justify, however, the
• 22:07
  claim I'm making is that this evolution of sponsorships correlates with the
• 22:13
  evolution of F1 as a cultural phenomenon.
• 22:17
  1950s, F1 was appealing to a subculture.
• 22:22
  You know, you look at the folks here, I think there are two women
• 22:27
  and one child in this photo.
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  Basically, it's a lot of guys, many of whom appear to be of the same age.
• 22:36
  It moved from subculture to more mass cultural.
• 22:39
  A wider range of people were coming.
• 22:41
  They were bringing their families.
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  You could fill the stands.
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  So we see the transition from the automotive products and tobacco products
• 22:50
  to the general consumer products.
• 22:53
  This is a transition I find interesting.
• 22:55
  And honestly, I was thinking, you know, maybe next year I ought
• 22:58
  to come up and do some research on the cooling of Formula One.
• 23:02
  So when did Formula 1 go from being a mass phenomenon to being
• 23:07
  associated with James Bond?
• 23:10
  So this was where it kind of took the leap from the general consumer products
• 23:14
  into kind of the higher end products.
• 23:17
  Interestingly, Formula 1 now is being used as a backdrop for fashion.
• 23:23
  It clearly has become very high end and very fashionable, although
• 23:28
  it does not look as if this has led to fashion sponsorships yet.
• 23:32
  So you don't see fashion companies putting their name on the vehicles,
• 23:36
  but of course, what you do see more than anything else now is this formula.
• 23:40
  One is the epitome of technological sophistication, and a lot of companies
• 23:45
  are taking advantage of that.
• 23:48
  Making the association and as I suggested giving some sort of tangible
• 23:53
  image to what is for the most part an intangible and in some cases
• 23:57
  almost incomprehensible product.
• 23:59
  It took me a while before I ever imagined what Palantir did.
• 24:02
  So, I think there's something here.
• 24:06
  Now, we just saw a presentation which was a long series of clear violations
• 24:12
  of the statistical principle that correlation does not imply causation.
• 24:17
  Just because two things happen together doesn't mean that one caused the other.
• 24:22
  In this case, I think that may be true.
• 24:25
  The audience for Formula One, or at least the stereotypes of the
• 24:29
  audience for Formula One, or how Formula One is viewed culturally,
• 24:33
  then leads companies to exploit that with appropriate sponsorships.
• 24:39
  Therefore, if we're interested in seeing where this is within the culture, we
• 24:45
  can look at this in order to do it.
• 24:47
  Thank you very much.
• 24:53
  Comment.
• 24:53
  Regarding sponsorship, you mentioned that Marlboro is
• 24:56
  there again and again and again.
• 24:57
  I get the impression that you don't have a sponsor ever sponsoring
• 25:01
  multiple teams in the same season.
• 25:03
  Is that correct?
• 25:04
  And if not, why not?
• 25:05
  I mean, it seems like you'd want your name splattered everywhere.
• 25:09
  You know, Marlboro never sponsored more than one car at the same time.
• 25:17
  You'd mentioned you, uh, hadn't seen a green car with tobacco sponsorship.
• 25:22
  Well, in North America, Cool Cigarettes was a major sponsor for almost a decade
• 25:28
  in Formula Atlantic and, uh, CART IndyCar.
• 25:31
  You started out talking, you mentioned the Go Bowling.
• 25:34
  I had a chance to interview the Go Bowling folks in August.
• 25:38
  Demographics is their big interest in NASCAR because their demographic
• 25:44
  in bowling are very similar to demographics of what they find.
• 25:48
  In NASCAR.
• 25:49
  And so that's why they come.
• 25:52
  And it's not just about being on the signage or on a car.
• 25:55
  They do what's called activation, which they bring a bowling alley here and set
• 26:00
  it up and let people get involved and the clothing and that sort of thing.
• 26:05
  But yeah, it's not just about your name on the car.
• 26:07
  It's what they call activation.
• 26:09
  and getting people involved and out to the track.
• 26:12
  You talked about cigarettes and alcohol sponsorship in the 70s.
• 26:17
  And you talked about, you know, the demographic, who
• 26:19
  they're trying to attract.
• 26:20
  I think it's also affected the memory of that era as well.
• 26:25
  In my social media streams, I'm always getting these pictures of
• 26:29
  James Hunt smoking and drinking.
• 26:31
  It seems to be that when people think nostalgically about that
• 26:34
  era, It's the smoking and drinking and, you know, leading to guys
• 26:38
  like Hunt being a little overrated.
• 26:40
  So anyway, I hope that doesn't offend anyone.
• 26:43
  Um, he kind of lucked into a championship, but that's another story.
• 26:47
  But I think it's also affected the memory.
• 26:49
  So not just the image of the time, but even how we think about the past.
• 26:53
  That's wonderful research, Skip.
• 26:54
  You're doing some great stuff there.
• 26:56
  I have a question about the role of the individual.
• 26:59
  Like, we see this in NASCAR a lot.
• 27:01
  A driver will come to a team with a sponsor, and that's
• 27:05
  where they get their job.
• 27:07
  And it's to the point where drivers will get fired because somebody
• 27:11
  else comes in with a more lucrative sponsor that's sponsoring the
• 27:15
  individual, not so much the team.
• 27:17
  They'll sponsor whatever car this guy or woman goes to.
• 27:21
  I'm just wondering if you saw that with Formula One.
• 27:25
  Because I'm thinking of someone like Lewis Hamilton.
• 27:27
  We were all talking about the fashion industry.
• 27:30
  He seems to be connected with a lot of high end clothing companies, Tommy
• 27:35
  Hilfiger, and then like the watch deals that so many see drivers promoting
• 27:39
  watches that seems to be much more personal than a team or a manufacturer.
• 27:45
  So just wondering if.
• 27:46
  There's any correlation there.
• 27:47
  That's clearly, that's clearly worth doing.
• 27:48
  As I said, the source for that information was by Constructor.
• 27:51
  Call me a slacker.
• 27:52
  I didn't go the next step to see what drivers were associated with
• 27:57
  those vehicles at the time and then to see whether they had an
• 28:01
  influence on subsequent sponsorship.
• 28:03
  But clearly, that would be worth doing.
• 28:05
  And actually, there's a wealth of PhD dissertation material here.
• 28:10
  There really is.
• 28:12
  Unfortunately, motorsports could stand to be a much more acceptable
• 28:15
  topic of academic research.
• 28:18
  I think we've just seen Bernie Ecclestone lectures on Formula One with Jim Miller.
• 28:23
  Then we got Richard Haynes coming up.
• 28:25
  Skip, wonderful presentation.
• 28:27
  Can't say enough good things about it.
• 28:29
  A lot of great comments.
• 28:30
  Yay.
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