In 2016, Formula 1 was a dying industry.
Drivers were not allowed to interact with fans outside of approved tracks, hours-long races were not suited to our short attention spans, and Formula 1 was considered a sport for rich Europeans.
Yet, Liberty Media, the company that purchased the Formula One Group for $4.4 billion in 2017, took the bet.
For them, the problem wasn’t that the sport wasn’t interesting. It was that people simply had no context.
The audience wanted to watch an exciting sport, but before anything else, they wanted a sport they could relate to.
So Liberty Media came up with a media strategy:
- They signed a deal with Netflix to produce “Formula 1: Drive To Survive”
- Encouraged teams and pilots to post on socials
- And released a movie which debuted with an impressive $144 million worldwide.
Fans today are still watching the same sport; it’s just that they now understand what is at stake, making the hours-long races much more exciting.
I recently stumbled upon a video from an interview of Virgil Abloh, Ex-Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton, where he explains clearly this concept:
“ If I put a can in a an all white gallery space, it’s a piece of art. If I put it in a garage, it looks like a piece of trash and someone would throw it away.
Everything in life is a matter of context.
Whether this is buying a piece of art or watching cars racing, what matters to us, is not really the thing itself but the story that is told around it.
If we get no job interviews, maybe the problem is not our skills or experiences but the lack of context in the story we are telling to interviewers. If we get no match on Tinder, maybe the problem is not our photos but the lack of context and anecdotes someone can relate to in our bio. If we get no new active members in our communities, maybe refining our why and sharing more about what we’re doing would help more than re-organizing Discord channels.
In the end, if people have no context, they can’t understand. And if they can’t understand, they don’t care. It’s that easy.
