Kicking and screaming

By George Woods Baker | Fans drive the numbers and never before has fan engagement been more critical to the life blood of Formula 1, a legacy sport playing catch-up in the fast-moving digital age we live in. Formula 1’s principal revenue stream has long been traditional broadcast television, but the sport has rested on its laurels for far too long.

Most fans aspire to attend a Grand Prix, it’s even on their bucket list. At the FIA’s 2015 Sports Conference Week held earlier this year in Mexico City, Joie Chitwood, President of Daytona International Speedway, talked about how ideal fan engagement begins. “When I think about how people are turned on to motorsport, it’s usually a live experience as a fan”, he said. “If we can get you there, there’s a good chance you will become an admirer because you have never seen anything like this; it’s truly visceral. It’s audio, it’s visual, it’s all of your senses. And that person turns into the fan that follows it socially, consumes it on TV, and maybe attends other related events”.

The fact is most Formula 1 fans, despite their best intentions, will never get to a race. They will instead depend on a content rich broadcast package to satisfy their itch. Between races social media increasingly plays a central role in keeping the dialogue fresh and the energy high – even when the news is as dynamic as it usually is in the highly secretive world of Formula 1.

Fans are made, they are not born.

What was once referred to as the “second screen” experience – the smartphone or tablet computer – only a year or two earlier is rapidly becoming the primary access point to fans around the world. They consume and trade data, information and intel on their hand-held devices long before they tune into a live feed or head for the circuit. The event, the race itself, plays out in support of or contrary to the mounting expectations of these armchair experts.

Formula One Management has made strides this season to increase its social media footprint and offerings, pushing out a variety of content on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Some might say their efforts were less than voluntary suggesting that those inside 6 Princes Gate were being dragged kicking and screaming out of the dark ages of print and broadcast with fixed news cycles and predictable journalists doing the reporting. To be fair, the current state of social media still resembles a frantic rush to nowhere as items are breathlessly duplicated and retweeted in a literary mosaic of headlines across multiple platforms in a never ending stream of shifting data.

Joe Brown, the Executive Editor of Wired US, also spoke at the FIA Conference in Mexico, stating that “it’s hard to know which platform for your endeavour will work the best”.

Declining viewers and an aging core fan base of white, married males with an average age of 49 do not bode well for a business model built almost entirely on the back of willing sponsors. And sponsors depend on engaged fans. In sheer volume, the younger the better. An informed fan base is the most valuable asset. Formula 1 has not actively engaged millennials who seek social engagement and digital interaction with brands or made much of a concerted effort to otherwise attract new customer segments.

But how do you attract a younger audience demographic if that target market perceives the sport to be boring or out of touch with their sensibilities? Lewis Hamilton keeps his millions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat followers engaged and entertained with daily updates from around the world. He’s in the minority of Formula 1 paddock personalities setting and maintaining a high bar. But how many others could emulate his example and elevate their own profiles and, by extension, the profile of the sport across a broader and younger demographic?

Bernie Ecclestone recently suggested that it’s time for “a complete rethink” of Formula 1: “We mustn’t forget we’re in the entertainment business, so we ought to have rules the public wants. We should be asking the public what don’t they like about Formula 1 today and what did they like about it before”.

Despite separate fan surveys from AutoSport and the Grand Prix Driver’s Association earlier this year, these are not easy questions to answer. More than 200,000 fans from nearly 200 countries took the time to express their views on everything from their favourite drivers and teams to the value proposition of attending a Formula 1 race or the current rules and regulations that make up the current formula. The message was simple: remove the gimmicks and improve the value of the show while also looking at how it can harness the power of digital and online platforms to reach new audiences and grow the sport.

Untested questions remain: will young fans engage with and consume their experience of Formula 1 differently than the previous generation? Are attention spans really an issue? Will their addiction to their personal devices drive content delivery? Will their consumption habits and brand awareness impact the rules of the sport as it evolves?

Joe Brown knows there are solutions just waiting to be tapped and tried: “It seems like there’s some low-hanging fruit that motorsport can take advantage of to really get the message out to everybody. This is such an exciting sport. Formula 1 has some of the best drivers in the world risking their lives driving at stupid speeds very, very close to each other, but it just doesn’t seem from the viewer’s perspective that it’s that exciting. We have an opportunity to creatively use the communication platforms that are out there to tell the viewers what’s going on in the race”.

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