Several years into their partnership with the championship-winning Formula 1 team Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS, Marriott had learned a lot about what drives engagement with motorsport fans. Highly engaged users latched onto content best when it demonstrated fluency in the language, jokes, and culture of the fandom. Marriott knew that in 2023 they would be most successful by leaning into these in their branded content, showing their authentic participation in the fan community.
Throughout the 2023 Formula 1 season, Marriott Bonvoy sought to achieve the following with their partnership marketing on social media:
Build brand awareness and consideration for Marriott Bonvoy through its partnership with the Mercedes AMG-PETRONAS Formula 1 Team.
Drive engagement with the program through partnership content.
Increase Marriott Bonvoy brand favorability among the broader F1 global audience.
In 2022, Marriott first chose to leverage access to Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team talent through their partnership to create a made-for-social film. They knew that the content had to be authentically entertaining to appeal to the F1 fandom, but also must pull through Marriott Bonvoy branded and key travel program attributes. Time with talent is always extremely limited, so the idea would have to achieve a lot of Marriott’s objectives in a short amount of time – just three hours to be exact!
In 2022, Marriott kicked off a content series with Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team driver George Russell that would transform how they marketed their partnership.
Marriott’s strategic imperatives for their partnership plan were to:
Leverage the global celebrity of Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team drivers, including George Russell, to broaden their reach generally.
Greatly widen their target audience to reach a mainstream F1 audience.
Increase exposure via branding touchpoints via social media, including new and emerging platforms.
To achieve their goals, Marriott created an entertaining content series that would interest general audiences but also feature fandom moments that would delight highly-engaged fans. With just three hours with George Russell, Marriott filmed the first episode of “Special Delivery.” The film highlighted key brand attributes related to the travel program (like late checkout) and wove in nods to George’s racing life. By leaning into the experiences Marriott Bonvoy offers members, viewers see George discover there’s more to Marriott Bonvoy than expected and that Marriott Bonvoy recognizes that their guests are the main characters in each of their stories, experiences, and stays.
This content drove incredible conversation among fans. To drive interest in the next episode, Marriott created a teaser plan for episode two that recognized fans’ participation and thrilled them with the promise of a new episode. One piece of teaser content featured George reacting to the best tweets and Instagram comments about his film debut with Marriott Bonvoy.
In 2023, Marriott extended this series with two new episodes of “Special Delivery” with George Russell. In episode two, George continued to show the benefits of living the Marriott Bonvoy lifestyle, this time in the South of France. Even more “if-you-know-you-know" moments (like a cameo from Team Principal Toto Wolff) made the content that much more exciting to members. Extensions for episode two included behind-the-scenes content to reward loyal watchers.
To align with the Formula 1 cultural moment of 2023, the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Marriott released a third episode of “Special Delivery” which showed how Marriott Bonvoy helped get George from London to the race. Nods to the fandom in this episode included featuring George’s favorite snack, a smoothie. By this time, fans were excited to see a third episode and earned content across TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram from F1 creators, Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS, and George Russell helped drive growing buzz.
To further capitalize on their time with George Russell, Marriott pulled a series of GIFs from the content series. The GIFs were snapshots of the most meme-able moments from the video series and were pulled with consideration to the moments that would resonate with F1 superfans, including inside jokes and clips that played on what fans love about George Russell. To align with their goal to build brand awareness and consideration, Marriott achieved 4M organic views on their GIF packs.
With the “Special Delivery” series, Marriott created innovative, witty, and relatable storytelling for Formula 1 fans. They wrote scripts they knew would be meme-able and delight the fandom.
All three episodes of “Special Delivery” achieved incredible reach and engagement. For each episode, Marriott iterated on their successes and improved both the relevance of the content and their media planning to climb to new heights.
Episode 1 Key Results:
Awareness measured with a brand lift study conducted via Meta: Ad Recall saw a 10.1 point lift (7.1 point lift travel benchmark) and Brand Awareness saw a 6.3 point lift (2.7 point lift travel benchmark).
Episode 2 Key Results:
Awareness continued to improve from Episode 1 to Episode 2, measured with a brand lift study conducted via Meta: Brand Awareness saw a 6.6pp lift - 189% lift over travel norms and 5% improvement over Episode 1.
Episode 3 Key Results
Brand lift study results are pending, but this iteration of the content series saw more than 18M views.
Organic performance hit record highs for Marriott with an engagement rate of 22% on TikTok.
The fans helped Marriott Bonvoy achieve their most impressive results. Within the Formula 1 fandom community on social media, fans and creators were inspired by the content series to create their own content. One TikToker, who covered Episode 3 on her Formula 1 creator channels, was even picked up by Mercedes AMG-PETRONAS for George to react to. Episodes 2 and 3 were featured in several George meme 2023 wrap-up videos on popular channels, including the official Mercedes AMG-PETRONAS end-of-year meme recap.
These results drove engagement with Marriott’s target audiences and secured future content with Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS.
