F1’s Drive to Survive shows why sport should build long-term demand

Formula 1, the highest class of motor racing, was for decades a pretty closed shop with high barriers to entry for participants and fans, but a strategy to widen its user base is beginning to bear fruit.

Why it matters

Focusing on short-term conversions at the expense of growing a future audience is as similarly problematic in sport as it is in product marketing. While there’s a great deal in this story that reflects the importance of humanising what can be quite a faceless sport, it chimes with the struggles of other sports which have their fortunes tied to pay-TV viewership.

What’s going on

Drive to Survive is a Formula 1 documentary series that follows all of the teams across a season. Crucially, the series is available on Netflix, which might be paywalled, but is still a lot cheaper than the pay-TV cable packages that typically carry sport.

• According to figures reported by The Athletic, Formula 1’s US audience – a market that it had consistently failed to crack before Liberty Media’s acquisition of the sport – has grown 121% for the 2022 season versus the 2018 season, the last before Drive to Survive went live.
• The sport’s audience changed before their eyes in that time: the average viewer age dropped from 36 in 2017 to 32 in 2022, while female viewership doubled.

“The audience that Netflix thought was going to come and watch it was very different from the audience that has shown up,” said Paul Martin, Drive to Survive's executive producer, in The Athletic.

Contrasts

Stratechery (a blog by thought-provoking analyst Ben Thompson) compares the US growth of F1 to the decline in NBA viewership.

• The trouble for top-flight US basketball, as Thompson sees it, is in the reliance on pay TV in the face of an ongoing ‘cord-cutting’ trend – it has seen cable companies’ household penetration fall from 85% in 2011 to just 48% in 2022 (virtual pay-TV-like YouTube TV excluded).
• Without an alternative entry point to introduce a new audience, cable companies have ended up relying on hardcore fans. 
• Turning to F1, Thompson notes: “What impresses me about the sport from a business perspective is how hard it works to get new fans — it sows the seeds it later reaps.”

Around the world

This isn’t just an American phenomenon. In India, where cricket reigns supreme, the huge licensing fees that pay-TV providers must pay for the rights to broadcast the Indian Premier League look risky amid the rise of advertiser-friendly digital viewership that can attract big audiences.

Sourced from The Athletic, Stratechery, WARC

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