Formula E executives pushing on with radical plans and silencing critics

What do you get when you take the biggest YouTube star on the globe, mix in some Draco Malfoy magic and blend in some brand Beckham?

The answer, Formula E executives hope at least, is audience engagement.

Jeff Dodds came on board as CEO in the summer of 2023 and has set about his own challenge to make Formula E the second most-watched motorsport series in the world with vigour.

The championship needs to be applauded for its all-female testing sessions, while innovations such as pit boost – an in-race feature where cars pit for 30 seconds to receive a 10% energy increase – continue to split opinion.

Now though, working alongside Ellie Norman, appointed chief marketing officer late last year following similar positions with Formula 1 and Manchester United, the pair is looking to grow Formula E’s fanbase through different channels.

“We are determined to grow our overall fanbase, and we won’t achieve that ambition by simply fishing in the motorsport pond,” said Dodds.

“That is a very important pond, but it’s also pretty small, so the onus is on us as a business to bring new fans to the sport.”

So instead of the motorsport pond, Dodds and Norman cast their line into the wide-open – and often dangerous – waters of social media.

The Evo Sessions, held in Miami last month, brought together 11 content creators including Brooklyn Peltz Beckham. Each of them was assigned a team and a driving coach, and had two days to get to grips with a car that accelerates faster than its Formula 1 equivalent. They then posted about their experiences to a combined social following of a quarter of a billion.

The plan was always going to create buzz and criticism, and probably always more of the latter. But for Norman it is about making sure such trials are carried out even if it means having thick skin with regard to naysayers.

“Honestly, I think there are times where you definitely feel there’s a lot of it [criticism],” she said.

“I definitely see my role is there to really push and innovate. So the last thing we can do is stand still and remain comfortable. It has to be about challenging the status quo, but to do that in a way that is respectful to the DNA of the sport. That is going to come with people feeling sort of uncomfortable.”

Dodds agrees, pointing out that blocking out all the incoming noise means missing out on constructive criticism along the way.

“We get a lot. So it’s a lot of incoming, a lot of inbound – often from people who are inherently quite critical,” he adds.

“It’s all about marginal gains. The danger for me is if you’re very thick-skinned, what that really means is they can say what they like and it’s just bouncing off you. The danger then is that the nuggets that come, which are really valuable, you just don’t listen to or you don’t hear because you throw everything out.”

“Therefore, I listen to everything. And then what you have to do is spend the time to process whether what you’re hearing is going to be helpful to our ambition or not helpful to it.”

YouTube star MrBeast was also on track at the Miami International Autodrome filming his own short and long-form content, which included an unscripted trip into the barriers.

With the new approach to content creation, does Formula E also have to change the way it deems whether such ventures are successful for the business?

“There’s lots of different ways of looking at it. I tend to look at it as the overall growth in value of the organisation over time,” explains Dodds.

“To get that, you’ve got to be growing your fanbase and you’ve got to be growing your media reach. You’ve got to be growing your sponsorship revenue and partnership revenue. 

“You need to be retaining your existing partners and sponsors. So there’s lots of different facets. I would say the metrics I talk about most publicly are awareness of the sport, the fanbase of the sport and media reach of the sport.

“If all those things are working, then the total value of the business is growing pretty significantly. Last year we grew the fanbase by 25% and we grew TV reach or TV audience by 35%. We don’t publicly talk about our revenues, but we’re in a really good trajectory at the moment.”

There has been a sponsorship boom in Formula 1 of late, the widening demographic bringing with it brands that want to capitalise on the additional exposure.

The partnership network within Formula E operates on a different model, with companies largely at the forefront as they also operate as technical partners with the series.

“A lot of our partners come in because they’re also focused on sustainability or technology development,” said Dodds.

“Now, understandably, a lot of them are B2B partners because they are focused on technology, next-generation technology. Whereas consumer B2C partners are more interested in reach and growth.

“We have some of those, but to unlock more and more of them, we need to be able to show them fan-based growth. So if you think about Formula 1 as a comparison to us, we’re about 400 million fans around the world. Formula 1 will be over 800 million fans.

“So they just have great scale. So a lot of B2C companies will look at that and say, ‘Oh, I can get in front of 850 million fans by doing that.’ And we’re building that scale.”