Push Push Premiere | WhatsApp x Mercedes-AMG

The Work | Rarely has a tech partnership in F1 gotten me this excited and for a few different reasons. I did what I usually do when I’m curious and excited about something in this space, I made a few videos breaking down the partnership, and why I thought it was special and clever. I guess the team on this account and the project saw and liked them. A few months later, I was contacted by the WhatsApp team, and invited to attend the Push Push premiere in Austin during the USGP race weekend and work together on a piece of content to continue to tell the story of WhatsApp in F1. That video got over 5M views.

The context | Here's why I think the WhatsApp x Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team partnership might be one of the most seamless partnerships in F1 history.

When the partnership was first announced at the end of last year, WhatsApp (owned by Meta) closed a multi-year deal and chose the Mercedes-AMG F1 team for its first sports sponsorship, it immediately felt different. It didn't fall into one of the three obvious buckets of sponsorship I was used to putting F1 partners in.

In recent years, F1 sponsors have mostly fallen into one of three categories: historic and iconic (think Rolex, Jack Daniels...), useful services (mostly B2B tech partners needed to run this show— think AWS, Salesforce, Oracle, Pirelli, DHL...), and B2C partners that aren't obvious choices and will be either a hit or miss (Reiss, Levi's, LEGO...).

When I attended my first NASCAR this year, one thing that stood out to me was just how many sponsors were customer-oriented vs. business-oriented like in F1 which has hundreds of sponsors that most people have never heard of but businesses use daily - like INEOS, Petronas, Salesforce, Crowdstrike, Juniper Networks, TeamViewer, AWS…

With WhatsApp, it's a mix of B2B and B2C meaning there is real value in the technology and services WhatsApp provides, but because it's a consumer-facing product it has far more brand recognition than some of the other B2B technology in and across F1. It also means the team at Meta can have fun activating their partnership. And fun they sure had.

To this day, their takeover of the race car emoji in WhatsApp is the most creative play I've seen in F1 in recent history. For context, the default for the 'race car' emoji is the little red car which in F1 very much symbolises 'Ferarri'. In contrast, the Mercedes-AMG F1 car is an almost entirely black car with a few turquoise elements. So what did the WhatsApp team do? They made it so that any time you look for the race car emoji in their chats, it's the little black car emoji (and not the little red car) that appears. This is even more clever, as Sir Lewis Hamilton will leave the Mercedes-AMG team for Ferrari next year.

Overall, it’s a genius sponsorship mostly due to the simplicity of the partnership - remote and cross-country communications for teams always on the go. For the travelling circus that is F1, this is the go-to channel of communication (sponsorship or not) as the entire paddock is made up of people from all over Europe constantly travelling the world and communicating with each other, partners, VIP guests, coordinating driver schedules... Probably all already using WhatsApp in their personal lives, and we all know how difficult it is to get team-wide adoption of new tools and processes.

Links:
The push Push documentary w/ Sir Lewis Hamilton - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBZBx8YOucT/ (Ad)
The emoji car takeover explained - https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9klaI3tvVO/
More creative fun from the team - https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6bOnCnLohv/
Their integration is deep - https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5HBHMePFi7/