Is Bernie holding Formula 1 back?
Having listened to what the delegates in the first session at the Motor Sport Business Forum had to say about broadcast rights in the new media age, I thought I’d set the cat loose among the pigeons. So, when Chairman Allen invited questions from the floor, I asked:
Given what was said earlier about the broadcast rights being based on a model that’s at least 15 years old, do you think that Formula 1’s rights holder is holding back the sport by clinging on to this outdated model?
I fully expected an epidemic of fence-sitting, but the responses were very interesting. Neville Wheeler of Cisco said:
The pace of change in the internet in general is so fast that unless you’re prepared to break away from the shackles of the old way of doing things, you’re rapidly left behind. You will very quickly find that the people who are passionate fans will seek out and access the content in one way or another.
The smart organisations are trying to find a way of monetising those rights, rather than trying to create a walled garden to protect them as long as possible. We have to get to a point where the audience immersion, social media and associated technologies are a key component of the way motorsport – and sport in general – is delivered to the global audience.
I like the ‘walled garden’ analogy. It speaks to everyone who has tried to access a territory-locked live feed or put up a montage of racing footage on YouTube. FOM has a marketing department of 12 and half of them must be lawyers; one probably even has ‘YouTube Grinch’ in his or her job title.
Gérard Lopez from Mangrove Capital Partners said:
To most people, the so-called MTV generation is the modern generation. To us it’s not – it’s old-fashioned. People don’t buy music any more. Kids don’t watch television as much as they used to. People consume media in a different way. Even some video game platforms are being forced out of the market by on-line gaming. Rights holders have to touch their audiences differently.
It doesn’t make sense to try to charge people for something that they will figure out how to get for free. F1 will be available on the internet and you need to be prepared for that. The challenge is not in deciding what you give away for free but in deciding what sort of value you’re going to provide on top of that – elements that people are actually willing to pay for.
New Lotus F1 boss Tony Fernandes said:
I came from the music business. I left that business because it didn’t want to embrace the internet. I told them [Time Warner] that if they didn’t embrace it, the music industry would be destroyed. They were more concerned with EBEYDL – Earnings Before Everything You Don’t Like – calling it ‘cashflow’. I quit that day.
Social media is a fantastic way of reaching an audience and keeping them excited on a day-to-day basis. There’s a massive opportunity. But whatever you do, it has to be accessible and reasonably priced. There’s a fantastic app for the iPhone that keeps you informed about timings on a race weekend, but it’s pricey. I think F1 has to look at that.
Everyone I’ve spoken to has been enormously impressed by Tony Fernandes. He seems to be exactly the kind of driven, entrepreneurial, forward-thinking businessman F1 needs, and not a flim-flam man or a Walter Mitty type.
The next panel was about sponsor value, and one or two of the representatives echoed the sentiment that FOM needs to take a more proactive approach to marketing the sport – but more about that in a separate post.