Before I started working in sport, going to different sports events around to world was one of my passions. I’ve been lucky enough to attend (as a fan) five Summer Olympic games, a World Cup final, 4 European football championships and multiple tennis grand slams. Throughout my travels, I’ve often noticed how poorly commercialised some big sporting events are. It always seems that there aren’t enough food and drink options and often, as a fan, you’re struggling to locate the nearest merchandise stands or fan activations. This is despite the thousands of spectators who attend these events, prepared to spend money, on their special days out.
Therefore, when I joined F1, I wanted to ensure that we were ahead of the curve in this area. It was imperative for us to improve the fan experience so that fans were more likely to return to our events in the future. We also wanted to ensure that we were maximising commercial revenue across our 21 annual races. It was however very clear when I joined that, except for a few races, we had very little knowledge and research into the fan experience and there wasn’t any ‘science’ into deciding where we placed our merchandise, food & drink stands or our fan activations.
Therefore, we setup two initiatives:
- Research amongst race attendees at 18 of our 21 races (the other 3 events already conduct their own research). We wanted to understand the profile and nationality of race spectators, their satisfaction with their experience and value for money perceptions
- Sensor technology at 10 races to understand how spectators are moving around the race circuit, and how they engage with our food and drink, merchandise and Fanzone activations
We used a two-pronged approach due to the limitations of ‘claimed’ behaviour vs. actual data in research. For example, on average 60% of fans at races claimed they bought merchandise. This is despite sensors showing that on average less than 50% of fans were seen within a 15-metre radius of merchandise stands at the races we measured. This highlights the importance of using behavioural data from the sensors and cross referencing it against stated research data – it creates more reliable data for our decisions.
The sensor technology (also referred to as wifi analytics) was provided to Formula 1 by Meshh. The sensors are placed on physical fixtures and let you understand how people move in physical spaces, their dwell time and journey paths by picking-up signals from wifi-enabled mobile phones (you don’t have to be connected to a wifi provider). We estimate that 80% of our fans are picked up by the sensors that we place around the circuits. This generates a large sample of fans (up to 250,000 fans seen in Silverstone) to assist us in our decision making. We deployed a total of 55 sensors at 10 races across the 2017 and 2018 season, placing them at entrance/exit gates, merchandise units, food and drink outlets, Fanzone activations and concert stages at races.
Be sure to tune in after the weekend for part 2 of the article presenting key findings of both projects!
