The glamour of fast cars. Testosterone. Exotic locations. Champagne showers. Grid Girls in Lycra holding lollipops. This is (or in the latter case was) the world inhabited by Ellie Norman - the marketer who powers one of the biggest sport icons of our time, Formula 1. The global director of marketing & communications describes that world as “intoxicating” but also “mesmerising and frustrating in equal measure.” A self-confessed petrol-head - who owns a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, Porsche 964 and a BMW M2 Competition and talks fluently about Mezger engines [it’s all about turbocharging] - Ellie has some serious racing chops. But there’s more. So much more.

Ellie joined the FI management team following ownership change in 2017, as its first ever marketing czar with the aim of delivering long-term sustainable growth across the fan base, viewership and race attendance. At a time when the adrenaline-fuelled sports brand was grappling with challenges around its image and relevance, the former Honda and Virgin Media marketer went in with a mission to reimagine F1 for the future as an entertainment property. Ellie got rid of the grid girls and quickly went on to launch a new F1 brand logo, the first in 23 years, to strong fan reactions.

Powering Change

“My world might look glamorous,” she says, “but really it is about man and machine pushing the limits.” F1, of course, is the pinnacle of fast cars and motor racing, travelling annually to 23 countries across five continents, drawing significant global television audiences (with an average viewership per Grand Prix in 2020 of 87.4 million) and is among a small group of marquee global sports with more than half a billion fans worldwide.

In January 2017, when F1 was changing ownership and being acquired by Liberty Media, she got the call to join its new management board. Ellie joined the company in April that year. “At the time, F1 was a combination of a start-up and a turnaround business and I was so excited. But they’d never had a marketer before. I thought what’s the worst that can happen - it won’t work out and I will need a new job.”

For those who knew her at Virgin Media and Honda - both creatively-driven brands that she was part of, during their periods of evolution- say that much like the F1 sport itself, which is about winning and breaking records, Ellie was guaranteed to succeed in marketing the brand beyond racing. After all, she has a brilliant pedigree. During her time at Virgin Media, she led the evolution of all its brand campaigns including the Usain Bolt '9.58 second' work by BBH. And was also responsible for its sponsorship transition away from the likes of V Festival to more strategic partnerships including Southampton Football Club and the Bafta TV Awards. At Honda Motor Europe, Ellie led the communications strategy for 27 markets.

“For me, the challenge [at F1] was how to make the sport accessible for today's world. It was also frustrating, because as a marketer I wanted to use my creative influence to try and adapt a business that is predominantly led by engineering people. And they are absolutely brilliant at what they do.” How did she then start making the change?

“I always think that as a marketer, you're very comfortable with the idea of ‘the future’ and change. For me, I saw F1 as a laboratory where we could accelerate progress.” But Ellie did not swoop in as a ‘hero’ marketer to save or redesign the business. After all, it is the engineers, not racers, who are the true drivers of success in motor sport, so problem solving with a rigour of data is always going to be a good thing. And that is precisely what she did.

When it came to the Grid Girls, Ellie knew it was time to move on. Especially at a time when F1 wanted to encourage more women to join the sport. The Grid Girls were scrapped for the 2018 season and instead came Grid Kids, who sing the national anthem next to the drivers. But only after Ellie’s team was armed with enough data and research into its fan base. F1 worked with research agency Flamingo on an in-depth global brand health study to understand where the brand is today, how fans feel, and the elements that needed change.

The landscape of F1's talent meanwhile has also evolved. Ellie informs that 38 per cent of F1 management's team are female. There’re even a few women on the pit wall.

The study, combined with Ellie’s mission to widen the sport's fanbase, also resulted in the overhaul of its logo for the first time in over two decades. F1 worked with Wieden & Kennedy London on the redesign, led by its creative leader at the time, Tony Davidson, and the agency design lead, Richard Turley. It was unveiled at the 2017 Grand Prix season in Abu Dhabi, leaving F1 fans dismayed and mourning the death of the previous design. Ellie confesses that the massive knee-jerk backlash from fans meant that she needed to switch off social media for a few days, but maintains that she was resolute in her belief that this first piece of her new strategy to take the fans’ sport to new audiences would ultimately be the future of F1.

“We don’t have customers, but fans. And any change can be unsettling for fans that have a deep-rooted relationship to such icons. What we needed to do next was to start to demonstrate what F1 is doing for fans to help grow the sport.”

Marketers like Ellie have this gift of infusing their own abundant vitality into their brand. The longer Ellie talks, the more she fills me with the conviction that F1 is more than just a fast cars’ racing business, much more than I had ever suspected (or indeed been interested) of it ever being. Her mission for the brand, she tells me, “has always been this - how do we need to show up like today and tomorrow to attract the future sports fan? How do we become more relevant?”

Some of the more recent strategies that Ellie's team have been implementing to grow its younger fanbase include increased video content, the use of platforms like TikTok, and marketing tools such as ‘Drive to Survive’, Netflix’s popular F1 behind-the-scenes series.

F1 - New Fans, New Purpose

But for a sport that is still seen as hugely male dominated, and remains exclusive and out of reach for many, the job is clearly far from done. Overseeing that hugely challenging modernisation of F1 marketing is what is driving Ellie.

She talks passionately - almost obsessively - about sustainable fuels and how F1 is working towards reducing its carbon emissions and bringing this progress to the one billion combustion engines driven on the planet.

There's more. Last summer, F1 launched its #WeRaceAsOne initiative to fight challenges of COVID-19 and global inequality. When the UK government was scrambling to find breathing aids, F1 put its engineers to use and helped build up to 1,000 breathing aids and ventilators a day. It also set up a Formula 1 Task Force to take actions required to improve the diversity and opportunity in F1 at all levels. Following the tragic death of George Floyd, F1 started using the ceremony at the start of every race to draw attention to ending racism. Mercedes F1’s Lewis Hamilton has been leading the way to focus on fighting racism and also help make motorsport more diverse. The British racer has teamed up the Royal Academy of Engineering to help young people from black backgrounds engage in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects with a view of employing them in engineering jobs.

Meanwhile, within two weeks of its first event being cancelled in March last year, the F1 Virtual Grand Prix series was launched, where a selection of drivers and sports stars raced from their homes. It allowed fans to connect and engage with the series’ stars on a more personal level. Innovation took a whole new level when the well-known Paddock Club, the series’ hospitality offering, became a virtual experience in 2020. This allowed F1 to take fans to never-before-seen places, such as former world champion Mika Hakkinen's home and garage.

“This is what the power of an incredible brand looks like,” says Ellie about how F1 allows her and the team to progress the fabric of the sport while having a meaningful relationship with the fans and the communities they live in. She adds that as a marketer she also knows that F1 is there to provide sheer joy “especially through difficult times like Covid when our fans were looking for escapism”.

All this while galvanising both the F1 brand and its community.

Ellie’s Creative Inspirations

Barbie doll & Barry’s Bootcamp

Ellie grew up in the countryside on a farm. Countryside, safaris and exercise sessions are her happy place, she says. And she has a passion for pilates, ‘Barry’s Bootcamps*’ and Barbie.

Japanese street fashion label BAPE has collaborated with F1 to introduce a range of F1-inspired apparel and accessories. The fashion brand then went on to collaborate with Barbie to produce a limited edition BAPE x Barbie collection, which was sent to Ellie. The idea for the F1 collaboration came out of the ambition to take the motor racing sports brand “out of its own echo chamber, and place it much more into popular culture, and share it the fashion, music and gaming spaces,” she says. And what about the BAPE Barbie? “That just makes me smile because it is Barbie redefined. And she's kick-ass Barbie basically.”

(*For the uninitiated, Barry’s Bootcamp is the celebrity-favourite bootcamp that first launched in West Hollywood. It’s now a worldwide phenomenon.)

Creative Heroes

Kerris Bright

Ellie and Kerris worked together at Virgin Media. “Kerris inherited me as her head of advertising and sponsorship at the time and I loved working for her and learnt so much from her. Even today it is Kerris I turn to when I need an opinion, a point of view. I just really value her.”

Wieden & Kennedy

“I’ve a real soft spot for W&K with the approach that they take for all their clients. I'm really fond of all their Nike work, like the recent one they did for Mother’s Day - it gave me goosebumps. I love their ability to tell stories on a very human level.”

Rankin

“Not just because he’s cool. But because of his ability to find the personality and the inner strength of the person that he’s photographing but has never met before. It’s uncanny. I always say to my husband that when I die, he’s only allowed to use that one picture of me that Rankin shot.”

Boldest Creative Play

Virgin Media ‘9.58 seconds’ by BBH

The film that lasted as long as Usain Bolt's 100m record was clever and was nothing like any other campaign featuring sports stars. “It was really bold for the time. But Kerris [Bright] and Carl Broadhurst [former BBH creative director, and currently the group creative director at Apple] and I felt in our guts that it was absolutely the right thing to do. We had such fun filming the campaign, and it performed really, really well. But that felt bold within the context of how as a brand we’d been operating and communicating before that.”

And everything “I was part of” at Honda

“When I think back of my time at Honda, all I can say is 'wow'. I was a junior marketer but so fortunate to genuinely experience true creativity. Having a very bold and brave president of the brand, Ken Keir, who really trusted and bought into the power of W&K’s work was just wonderful to watch and learn from.

“The advertising very rarely ever showed a car. And anything that was like a traditional kind of car ad, we would almost like do the opposite. It was one of the boldest things I was part of.”