Ideas We Love: LVMH x F1 🏁
Issue Number 31: LVMH sign 10 year, multi-brand deal with Formula One that gives us a good excuse to dust-off a framework-we-love
Good morning and Happy Q4 to you!
After a feast of ideas over the past couple of weeks, the famine this week saw us scratching our heads until we came across the news announcement below.
The idea: LVMH x F1 🏁
Formula 1 announced on Wednesday that luxury brands group LVMH will enter F1 by becoming a Global Partner in 2025 – coinciding with the year the sport will be celebrating its 75th anniversary.
Paying a cool $1BN+ for the privilege.
Why we love this idea ❤️
Typically rights holders chop up opportunities into different packages; but given LVMH has a portfolio of luxury brands and an army of A-List talent on-tap they aren’t just turning up to the grid, they’re taking over.
TAG Heuer will replace Rolex as the sports official time-keeper 🕛
Louis Vuitton will turn every trophy presentation into a stage for their hardware 👜
Moet & Chandon will now be sprayed each week from the winners podium 🍾
We’re assuming each brand’s talent will be front and centred on the grid walk, dripping in whatever their Maison’s latest collections and time pieces happen to be; papped-up, storied-up and shared across the socials each and every race week.
To create a more immediately commercial edge to the deal, no doubt LVMH will also turn the spaces that surround the pit-lane into pop-up extensions of their sprawling network of boutiques at the same time; not just positioning LVMHs products in racing culture, but selling them to some seriously HNWIs at the same time.
Kerching. 💸
When we saw this news breaking it reminded us of a simple, much-loved, much presented 2x2 we’ve used to help clients in different guises pull apart and see the opportunity that lies in striking partnerships of different shapes and sizes.
With the vertical axes pulling apart whether collaborations are simply badging the partners assets and properties or whether there is something deeper in-play; working together and building new products, services and with it creative platforms that didn’t exist previously.
With the horizontal axes pulling apart collaborations seen as logical extensions of a brands existing activities, or potentially more lateral leaps towards something that’s unexpected of the brands / partners involved.
Creating 4 distinct ways we’ve seen brands collaborate their way into and across different subcultures and communities; that we’ll illustrate with a bunch of other famous ideas we’ve loved across the years along the way.
Let’s feast.
#1 Anchoring ⚓️
The first approach is one we call “anchoring”.
Where sponsorships and partnerships are used to strengthen the existing media plan, overserve audiences of value and build aspirational associations in the process.
Conventional approaches, that deliver tangible and scalable outcomes.
LVMHxF1 is a great example of anchoring; following-up from their splash at the recent Paris Olympics.
In Matt’s opinion Heineken are the masters of it; wrapping their red star, their green bottle and their tagline of the time around the things the people they wish to recruit and re-recruit back into the brand most eagerly anticipate, enjoy and maybe even crack open a beer in front of.
Locking Heineken in and locking competitors out of the opportunity.
Giving Heineken the chance to distribute their famous red, green and white iconography amongst hundreds of millions of eyeballs, across dozens of countries, for most weeks and weekends of the year, within the most eagerly anticipated and aspirational media properties.
Truly flexing their global scale, but doing so in locally resonant ways too, like this all-timer from Italy.
A conscious choice that’s created more cultural and commercial clout than they otherwise might, than if Heineken decided to use their global sponsorship investment but fragment it through market-by-market advertising campaigns that require different ads to be made and different agencies to get paid.
If you’d like to read more about Heineken’s sponsorship approach, As part of Matt’s A to Z of Media Planning project he dedicated H to Heineken over here (to indirectly talk about the power of sponsorships)
#2 Extending 📈
The next collaboration space is one we’re calling “extending” – where savvy brands are working with other brands and businesses outside of their core competency to create new products, platforms and services that just “make sense” – but wouldn’t a) be possible or b) be as potent without the other being involved.
A familiar example for reference would be Nike & Apple – who first came together to create the Nike+ running shoe chip in 2007, which has evolved over 15 years into a specific variant of the Apple Watch designed to help unlock more of the athlete in everyone.
Another famous example is from LEGO, who have lent their bricks and master builders to a seemingly unlimited array of intellectual properties, wonders of the world and objects of desire to create new ways for people to play with LEGO and new ways for people to play with the things they love.
In realising people’s love and talent for LEGO surpassed even what their own teams can imagine; LEGO put this to good use in creating LEGO Ideas a UGC platform that encourages people to share concepts for new sets for a chance that they may go into full-scale production one day.
With some of the most famous sets to come out of the platform including the Friends coffee shop, the DeLorean from Back to the Future as well as The MacAllister’s Mansion from Home Alone – with the original contributors receiving a (shamefully slim) cut of revenues and kudos that lasts a lifetime.
#3 De-positioning 💣
We move from the “Logical” side of the fence to the more “Lateral” side now.
Where new and novel collaborations can break brands out of category conventions and place them in new, unexpected contexts (or use expected ones, in unexpected ways) that de-position the competition at the same time.
Ballantine’s whisky, in a category that typically advertises to and attracts male, pale and stale drinkers in dry and dusty drinking occasions rocking up, then continuing to stay with Boiler Room across the past 10 years would be a good example of breaking with convention at the time.
LinkedIn’s favourite debating topic, Liquid Death, are brilliant at creating lateral acts with likeminded others - a good example being when they teamed up with Good Morning Football’s Kyle Brandt to host the first-ever Hydration Assistant Scouting Combine in Los Angeles.
Rather than us wang on, here’s what their VP had to say on what they were up to.
“Brands throw insane endorsement contracts at pro athletes all the time – but being the fastest-growing water brand of all time, we know that athletes aren’t the only ones in pro football who deserve to be famous – it makes sense that our first sponsored person in football would be the top hydrator in the game” Andy Pearson, vice-president of creative at Liquid Death
Whilst subverting conventional sponsorship spaces is one way to de-position brands, another way is starting from an altogether different space entirely.
Habito Insurance is a good example of this.
A challenger brand seeking to up-end the way people buy and finance their homes, who started their foray into sponsorships from a different space by becoming patrons of UK Skateboarding.
Lovely, and a little bit different to just a.n.other F1, Football, Rugby or Cricket sponsorship.
#4 Re-imagining 🧠🧐😶🌫️
The last space that we’ll touch on is one we call “re-imagining” - activities which imagine new futures for the brands in question, new products or platforms, that are communicated in new and novel ways.
The lead protagonist in this space over the past decade or so was Supreme; lending their creative direction and distinctive red and white iconography to brands and labels across the world, both big and small – from toothpastes, to fire hydrants to yep, hello again Louis Vuitton’s luxurious range of luggage.
A playbook adopted by brands from all domains to extend their product lines, to cross-pollinate audiences and create new sources of revenue at the same time.
Some brands have taken a lateral view to not just who they collaborate with, but more broadly across their whole marketing mix to re-position themselves and de-position competitive brands at the same time.
A great example of this transformation came from GUCCI across recent years, who completely re-imagined who they work with, what they produce and where they show-up to be perceived as a much more vibrant brand vs. a few short years ago.
Exemplified across their collaborations with outdoors brand The North Face.
Helping Gucci’s revenues soar.
Bringing it back to and closing this post as we started it with an F1 idea that Tom walked through in #IWL5💕 who created their soap-opera, staged on the pit-lane with Drive to Survive.
The series was part of a co-ordinated strategy by Liberty Media who acquired Formula One in 2017 from long-time owner Bernie Ecclestone – to recruit new audiences and grow the appeal of the F1 brand across new territories and particularly the U.S.
The results of which have been stunning, no doubt helping convince the likes of LVMH to stump up the $1BN+ just in time for their 75th birthday.
In summary 🗒️
For brands that are yet to start their collaborative journey, sponsoring and partnering with media properties that have consistent reach and cultural resonance in-built are a great route towards broadening appeal and recruiting new audiences – in essence extending the media plan to reach hard to reach audiences and creating a cultural anchor for any brand or product activations.
The empirical proof around the effectiveness of collaborations is anchored in traditional sponsorships and partnerships, but the logic of how they work from a marketing communications perspective stretches across other combinations of brands, places, spaces, properties and personalities.
Be that extending your product lines or point of view of the world with likeminded others – in the way Apple & Nike have so successfully across the past 15 years.
Be that de-positioning the competition by subverting the way conventional partnerships are activated, or finding new types of partners altogether – in the way Liquid Death have so creatively whilst building a $BN brand from nowhere.
Or be that re-imagining what it is your brand produces, or stands for, by creating
new types of products and new expressions of the brand that can start to attract new audiences or expand the need-states a brand can meet moving forwards.
Until next time
We hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane as much as we did.
Let us know if you think the 2X2 is any good (or not) too.
Matt & Tom Xx