It’s many people’s dream work scenario – being made global director with the opportunity to build your team from scratch. No need to put up with irritating legacies, be they team members or badly crafted trackers. Oh, and throw in a glamorous sport, with celebrities, travel and massive reach, and you’ve got a rather heady mix. But this is exactly what was offered to Matt Roberts when he was appointed global research director for Formula One (F1 ).

It’s not hard to see why he was approached for the role: Roberts had almost ideal experience, combining media and sports. First entering the world of market research on the Millward Brown graduate scheme – via several ad sales researcher roles, ESPN, Eurosport and BT Sport – he ended up at Sky Sports. “I didn’t intend to leave Sky, because I enjoyed working there, but then F1 came calling. My brand research, coupled with knowledge of how TV audiences and commercial works, fit together – it’s ended up being the perfect job,” says Roberts.

Although he describes himself as a big sports fan and a keen runner, F1 wasn’t particularly on his radar. “I’ve always kept an eye on what’s going on without necessarily watching lots. But nothing really could have prepared me for understanding how the sport works from within,” he explains.

How it works is multifarious and political, as I discovered when preparing for this interview. This is partly because there are so many businesses involved, at different ends of the sport, and often with diverging requirements. From headlines declaring race organisers’ concerns about the future of F1, to team owners saying Liberty Media – which bought F1 for £6.4bn in 2017 – underestimated what it had taken on, there are plenty of competing voices vying for attention, and they are often critical.

“It’s a very complex sport,” says Roberts. “You have a set number of teams and race promoters – they are separate companies from F1 – and you have sponsors. They all have a piece of the pie.”

He must be sure that any research by F1, giving insight into the sport, is shared equally, so that no team has an unfair advantage over another. With no overarching F1 sponsorships, each team arranges its own, which means the competition between them stretches in many directions.
So where did Roberts start when building the insight department from scratch? Sean Bratches, managing director of commercial operations at F1, hired him with a rather vague remit, he explains, to “just build up lots of good research”. “I realised it was down to me to shape what we did,” he adds.

First, he created a team that included Sky colleague Greg Morris – “a sports fan who knows numbers like the back of his hand” – a digital expert and a data analyst. The team is now five strong.

Getting the research up and running was similarly fast-paced. “Sean said: ‘We want to understand fans; we need to do fan tracking; we need to see segmentations; we need something up and running over the summer.’ This was already May – and I didn’t even start working until 1 June,” says Roberts.

It began with Flamingo doing an in-depth brand study (see below) consisting of focus groups in the UK, the US and Brazil, with a mix of non-fans, lapsed fans, casual fans and avid fans. “We did semiotics, brand mapping, looking at social media. The goal was to understand where the F1 brand sits in people’s minds, and what we need to do to make it more appealing,” says Roberts.

This fed into how it created its tracker, as well as a marketing campaign. Flamingo produced a brand book outlining all the facets of what F1 needed to do to improve the brand. “Quite a lot of the directors have that book on their desks. It is a stepping stone for everything that we’ve done since,” says Roberts.

One barometer of success for the new F1 was whether it could grow fans and fan engagement. Ipsos won the business for its fan-tracking research, delivering the first wave (from seven markets) that July. “We had six segments put together. It was quick – 14,000 interviews from May, to have results in July. Our tracker is about to go into wave eight. Now we do 1,000 sports fans in every market, and we’re up to eight markets every quarter.”

Another focus is getting fans to do more. “Back in Bernie’s [Ecclestone’s] day, we didn’t have a Facebook page or any social media videos, and the drivers weren’t allowed to put anything out. Just by developing those areas, we’re driving people who are casual fans to become more avid and do more things within the sport,” Roberts says.

The biggest challenge, he adds, is the same one he’s found in previous client organisations – getting the insight seen and acted upon. “We’ve learned that there are some people here who won’t sit in a room for an hour and look at a presentation – and they are the ones we need to start thinking about. Do we need one page, five bullet points, this is what you need to know, how you need to act? Do we need an infographic with just key findings?” 

Every Friday, the insights team sends the senior executives – Ross Brawn, Chase Carey and Bratches – a note with three things they need to know. Roberts says that, for some stakeholders – who aren’t necessarily very research literate – even basic surveys can make a huge difference compared with the days when there was no insight team.

“Sometimes, you do something with our community with, say, five questions. They’re like, ‘oh my god, this is so helpful’. There are really easy wins with some people here, who are just amazed to have any numbers. Then you’ve got a strategy team who want you to go deeper into the data,” Roberts explains.

Two things stood out from his team’s early research – the first being that F1 didn’t do enough with the drivers. There are only about 20 F1 drivers in the world, but the research found that about 60% of sports fans globally couldn’t name more than three of them. Despite the current culture of celebrity, the fans didn’t know anything about the drivers’ lives, as most of them weren’t on social media, with the exception of Lewis Hamilton and one or two others. “We had to elevate these drivers – they are our stars of the sport.”

The second thing revealed by the research was that many people described F1 as ‘just cars going around a track’. This is perhaps because TV gains F1 an audience, but loses the intimacy and dulls the sense of a race, compared with the live experience “They don’t really appreciate the speed and that the drivers are proper athletes,” says Roberts. “Have you ever tried to move the steering wheel of an F1 car or put your foot on the accelerator? It’s so hard – you’ve got to be so strong. These guys are really pushing themselves to the limit of what is capable. They’ve got to concentrate at 200mph for two hours.”

The research resulted in F1’s first ever ad – created by Wieden + Kennedy – called ‘Engineered Insanity’. This tries to make the viewer feel what it’s like to be a driver, highlighting the visceral aspects of the sport.

To build the drivers’ profiles, F1 has created events to get them together in city centres, in front of bigger crowds. “It’s not just for avid or casual fans – we’re trying to get them to be more well known, giving them content around the sport that they can put on social media. The problem is, Lewis Hamilton does it really well, but some others, such as Sebastian Vettel say, ‘I’m a private person. I don’t want to do social media’,” explains Roberts, who says about half the drivers have bought into the idea.

“We’ve still got some who don’t understand that they need to push themselves out there a bit more.”

As a global sport, there’s the added complication that fans can behave quite differently across countries. With tech company Meshh, the insights team has used sensors to track fans’ mobile phones and Wi-Fi analytics, and can monitor their behaviour when they attend races – such as looking at whether they go to the fan zone or the merchandise store.

“We found that Middle Eastern fans are incredibly different, in terms of their behaviour, from European fans,” says Roberts. “The Middle Eastern
fans spend a lot of time in family and kids’ areas, and not that much time watching the racing – it’s a family day out for them. In Bahrain, 30% of
people did not move from the fan zone. In the fan zone, you can’t see the track. For the European fans, it is more centred on the racing.”

Other research focused on the sport’s online community, F1 Fan Voice. Working with sports-data consultancy, Goodform – and using FlexMR for the platform – Formula One now has a community of 53,500 global fans it can tap into for surveys and polls. So, what’s been the most surprising thing that Roberts has discovered?

“When I came here, I assumed that all our fans would be men in their fifties. In the US and China, the average fans are really young, because it’s not an established 70-year-old sport like it is here; it’s a 15 to 20-year-old sport or younger,” he says.

While the younger fans are more digitally savvy, the older, European ones are more TV-focused – which creates its own challenge. “We want these guys in Europe to use more of our touchpoints. We also want to encourage younger fans to become interested in the sport; that’s a whole 2019 workstream – how we engage younger fans more in Europe.”

It is making progress. In the company’s Ipsos survey of people who identify themselves as having become a fan since 2017, 62% are under 35 and 37% under 25.

“We’re doing a good job, mainly through all these initiatives that we’ve launched to drive that younger interest – social media, videos, F1 Fantasy, eSports. We just need to do a bit more of that, I think,” says Roberts.

Flamingo brand study

Superficially, F1 appeared to be about the fastest cars in the world racing in front of a privileged global elite. Digging deeper, Flamingo identified 10 core essentials of the brand.

Insights were gained from three sources: fan group discussions; cultural analysis of F1 collateral; and network mapping to see where F1 sits in relation to other cultural elements.

1. F1 is a spectacle more than a sport – give fans more to look at
2. It is a test of physics rather than biomechanics – a need to continue to ask the big questions: what is possible?
3. F1 is about human characters and virtues more than national identities – reveal drivers’ characters
4. It is a game of risk/death – small errors must be heavily punished
5. F1 is ‘the best’ – compare/spread its know-how to other fields of endeavour
6. F1 is not about cars – an opportunity for more non-auto tech brands
7. It has licence to be ruthlessly commercial – but business must not harm the spectacle
8. F1 is not a meritocracy – an issue for the US where sport is democratic
9. Fans are an intensely connected subculture – brands need F1 to connect to this group
10. F1 sits in good company – closely neighbouring luxury timepieces and action adventure.

Responding to the race

Populus, along with its technology partner MindProber, ran what it claims to have been the world’s first biometric survey for a live televised sporting event, for F1.

Using biometric technology – galvanic skin response (GSR) – it can identify which moments are the most engaging. The data collected measures emotional arousal and stress, overlaid with respondents’ reported reactions (submitted into an app before and after the event).
The results meant F1 could track and optimise TV production to improve the fan experience – for example, by changing camera angles and commentary.

“We’re trying to understand what drives engagement during our races,” says Roberts. “We did a pilot at Silverstone and, in 2019, we’re going to do it at every race. You get a wonderful dashboard with the video playing and the line going across it, and you can see when they’re engaged, when they’re not engaged.

“If we, in our broadcast feed, are showing too many pit stops that people just don’t find engaging, we can change that,” he adds.