How Digitas Kickstarted Cadillac's F1 Journey

The Super Bowl is the pinnacle stage for brands; millions of consumers are watching, and an ad slot during half-time is worth an estimated $8m. 

The timing of this year's game coincided with luxury car brand Cadillac announcing its new Formula 1 (F1) team entry; not only did it look to capitalise on one of the world's most sporting events, but it looked to create a platform for attention to land and to keep audience engagement levels high. 

Its online hub was designed as a digital home for the brand’s latest chapter as it grows race by race, and alongside Publicis-owned Digitas, the website was built in just 27 days.

The agency’s CCO Carren O’Keefe details how the team built and executed Cadillac’s vision in such a short time frame, how to relaunch the brand in today’s culture, and how the work looked to capture attention.

Creative Salon: What was the brief behind launching Cadillac F1 Team into culture – was it about awareness, credibility, or something more long-term?

Carren O'Keefe: From the very beginning, the site was positioned as the digital home of the Cadillac F1 team, a place where the brand, engineering credibility, culture, partners, commerce and community converge, not just for awareness or a one-off launch asset.

The launch of the team’s livery during the Super Bowl created instant attention, but our brief was clear - everything after that moment mattered just as much. The website needed to absorb the weight of the launch and then carry the incredible under-dog story forward race by race as the season unfolded.

The goal was to establish The Cadillac F1 Team as a serious, competitive entrant into F1, built from zero and designed to challenge the established teams.

What was the strategy behind producing work that helps shift how the brand is perceived by a younger, more diverse audience?

F1 is still gaining momentum in the US, and Cadillac — iconic symbol of American automotive status since 1902 — gives American fans an F1 team they can back with belief. That created an opportunity to connect with a younger, more diverse audience than many established F1 teams. To reinforce the challenger brand story, we intentionally avoided familiar F1 clichés and did not rely on inherited heritage.

The Cadillac F1 Team set out to combine engineering credibility with cultural relevance, and we helped bring that to life by expressing its focus on precision, craft and performance in a way that felt authentic.

Cadillac is an iconic brand, but F1 is a very specific, global subculture. What tension did you want to resolve between those two worlds?

There is a natural tension between an iconic American luxury automotive brand and one of the most demanding, ruthless global sports on the planet. One is often associated with craft and refinement; the other with speed, data and constant iteration.

Our role was to resolve that tension through the digital experience. Rather than leaning too far into either world, we focused on what they share. Both are rooted in engineering excellence and attention to detail.

That shaped how we approached the site, from the clarity of the design system to the way information is structured and surfaced. It’s deliberately precise, fast and purposeful, but with a level of refinement that reflects Cadillac’s brand.

The result is an experience that doesn’t try to reposition Cadillac for F1, but expresses it in a way that feels native to the sport and is flexible enough to evolve as the team’s story unfolds across the season.

The website was built in 27 days – what had to change in your usual creative process to make that possible?

The biggest shift was building the site the way an F1 team builds a car.

That meant:

• Designing and engineering in parallel, not sequentially.

• Prioritising architecture and performance decisions upfront, so speed didn’t compromise quality.

• Removing anything that didn’t directly support performance, storytelling or scalability.

Choosing MACH architecture and a headless CMS wasn’t just a technical decision – it was a creative enabler. It allowed the creative team to move at “race speed” without developer bottlenecks and ensured the platform could evolve continuously beyond launch.

The process became more focused, more disciplined, and more ruthless about what mattered.

How did the relationship between agency and client evolve over such a compressed timeline?

The timeline forced a shift from a traditional approval model to a true partnership.

With zero margin for error and a fixed Super Bowl deadline, the relationship became highly trust based, with fast decision making, shared standards, and a clear North Star.

To make it work, agency and client operated more like a single team aligned around performance, rather than separate sides negotiating trade offs.

What did this project teach you about how brands should launch in 2026 and beyond?

It reinforced that launches are no longer moments — they’re beginnings, and in this instance the start of a relationship with the fans that will grow race by race.

Brands enter culture through spikes of attention, but they’re judged by what they do after the spike. The Cadillac F1 Team site wasn’t built as a campaign endpoint, but as a centre of gravity — a scalable platform designed to grow with every result, milestone and chapter.

That’s already playing out in practice, with the experience updating in line with the live race calendar, from new content drops to race-specific moments like countdowns and key updates.

Our lessons were clear:

• Your first expression must be technically bulletproof.

• And the platform must be built to evolve in public, reacting to the drama on the track.

Brands that win aren’t the ones with the biggest launch moment — they’re the ones with the strongest foundations.

Technology and creativity are moving faster than ever. That can feel overwhelming to a lot of people, but the team harnessed it to match the moment, and create at the speed of F1 itself without compromising quality and craft.