Hi friends - Niru here.
Here are the most useful newsletters from my archive for you to read
P.S. Don’t subscribe or give me feedback.
I had a conversation with a CMO who has spent his career in Telecoms and international tech. Meet Gareth Abel.
He’s spent his time deep in marketing science that most of motorsport is only starting to reach for.
The job isn’t reach. For most of the brands, the job is a brand attribute score.
Where you sit on being perceived as credible in your target segment, tracked as a number and moved deliberately over time, say from 3.5 out of 5 to 4.0. Teams tend to only report reach and activity instead.
This issue is about these numbers and how you build a sponsorship around them.
Revolut is the clearest live example on the Formula 1 2026 grid, so I’ve used it and Audi F1 to work the method through end to end.
It applies to any brand-side reader carrying a partnership they need to defend, and to any team that wants to sell one better.
In today’s issue:
Why business banking makes credibility the only objective
Turning a brand attribute score into a CFO-ready number
The funnel step that unlocks a sponsorship forecast
Why Audi should market to itself first
COMMERCIAL NEWS
🛠️ BUILD
Tom Potter and Jonny Odell (Rush Sport & Entertainment) broke down the renewal trap most F1 brands fall into - audit your deal before the team sends it a proposal, or you renew on their terms and pay more for less.
Velocity Experience detailed its Barilla season: five races, 250+ guests, one framework travelling from Suzuka to Silverstone - consistency across a calendar builds the trust a single weekend can’t, and the value compounds instead of resetting after each race.
📈 MONETIZE
Alex Kopilow (Sponcon Sports) laid out eight questions to ask a partner before building anything - set the KPI in discovery and the idea gets easier to sell, measure and renew.
Ricardo For shared Bank of America data on World Cup host cities - restaurant spending grew roughly twice as fast as in non-host cities during match weeks, which answers the mayors calling mega-events a public drain.
🌱 GROW
The Activation tracked all six Wimbledon partners across the fortnight, from Stella Artois covering five lanes to IBM’s one - tenure and activation breadth don’t move together; more touchpoints won’t make a better campaign.
I shared the three- move method behind three motorsport job offers last week; all coming from this newsletter, the highest return on memory you can build; it puts you in the right inboxes every week.
⚙️ OPERATE
Andrew Yeung (Fibe) explained the People- Process - Technology framework behind running 100 events a year - the person closest to the problem can now build the fix themselves, no engineering queue required.
♟️ STRATEGY
Aaron Morey put a question to marketers: Team A wins with 75,000 impressions, Team B finished tenth with 3M through content - who won? - The answer decides whether you’re still buying results or now buying attention.
Revolut only needs 1%
Around 0.5% of UK SMEs switched their business bank last year through the industry scheme. Revolut is the title partner of the Audi Revolut F1 team, and it is selling into a market where almost the entire customer base is sitting still.
It decides how you put a number on it and what the sponsorship is for.
Gareth Abel is an international CMO with a tech and services background, and he specialises in delivering sustainable profit growth leveraging proven effectiveness principles, including mental availability, the 95-5 rule, the custom funnel, brand attribute tracking and more.
He uses this proven approach inside large businesses, and he has watched motorsport grow into a communications channel that major brands now take seriously.
When we spoke in June, he described a gap that F1’s own success has opened up.
As the sport’s popularity rapidly increased, new partners were added at pace, with teams (& F1 itself) taking advantage of the rising tide. However, the marketing effectiveness rigour around the sale has room to catch up, which represents a major opportunity.
You can see this in what gets reported at the end of a season.
Reach delivered
VIPs entertained
Media value calculated
A few 100 people at an activation
Each of those is a count of activity. However, the person holding the investment budget is asking a different question:
What’s the outcome that changed in the business?
The best marketing leaders and brands are now using marketing science to deliver business outcomes, and this touches every aspect of their:
Strategy
Tactics
Tracking
Investment in F1 will increasingly be assessed in this way.
Who is Revolut trying to reach?
A very small number of people, on a very long clock.
A large company choosing a banking partner is making a decision it expects to live with for a long time. Ask around your own finance team, and you will find people who have been with the same bank for 20 or 30 years.
Gareth’s read, from years on the brand side of these decisions, is that the maths shifts accordingly. The 95-5 rule puts only 5% of buyers in market at any moment.
He estimates business banking runs closer to 99-1, given how long those relationships last, and he made it clear on the call that this is his inference from experience, not a published figure.
John Dawes, who originated the 95-5 rule, calls it a heuristic that moves with the purchase cycle, so Gareth is extending the thinking in the direction it was built to go.
The two hard numbers I say are the 0.5% SME switching rate and a median US business banking relationship of around seven years.
The conclusion holds either way. Almost nobody is buying this quarter, so the whole job is being the credible option on the day the 1% moves. This is called building mental availability - and it’s the main job for marketers.
Credibility is the objective. Reach is what the channel happens to deliver on the way there.
- Gareth Abel
How do you turn credibility into a number?
You measure how your brand’s intentional positioning lands in the segment you care about, against the people you’re trying to take business from.
This is what brand attribute tracking does. A brand names the things it wants to be known for (its positioning) - credible, international, technical heritage and performance - and it measures where it sits on each one.
It measures against itself over time to see progress, against its competitors to see its position, and against anything negative it carries and wants to shed.
Third-party analytics tools like Kantar and Qualtrics run this work for many large brands on a regular cycle. Synthetic market research businesses using AI are now making this faster and cheaper, offering brands an effective new tool to measure their brand management efforts.
Take a generic example. A brand sits at 3.5 out of 5 on being perceived as credible in its chosen segment. It sets an objective of 4.0 by a stated date.
Every activity from that point is judged on whether the score moved. Nobody outside a brand’s own building sees these numbers, including me, so treat the figures as illustration and the method as the takeaway.
Teams talk about “some kind of brand plan” that is agreed between the partner and the team, and it links to the activity delivered.
The brand tracker sits somewhere else entirely, in the brand’s own building. The two documents live next to each other and never speak.
This presents a major risk: the team’s activity with the partner doesn’t drive their objective.
“An objective is a position on a scale with a date attached”.
Why does Audi fit what Revolut needs?
Because the attributes are already in the asset.
A manufacturer with international reach, technical heritage, and a reputation for performance holds precisely what a challenger bank is trying to associate itself with to ensure its target segments consider Revolut a credible banking provider.
Audi F1’s positioning lands those attributes accurately, and it does that work at the top of the funnel, on awareness and consideration, which is where mental availability gets built for everyone who is out of market today.
Revolut’s own framing runs along the same line. Audi is taking on the established team as the counterpart of Revolut taking on the established banks
Gareth’s caution is that an F1 partnership is one lever among several tactics and channels.
Kantar’s Art of Integration work found that integrated and customised campaigns run 57% more effectively than non-integrated ones, and that adding channels only helps when they work together.
Sponsorship earns its place alongside retail, owned channels, and advertising, all pointed at the same objective.
This means an F1 partnership, on its own, is a less effective way for brands to achieve their objectives and business outcomes than a multi-comms-channel approach.
In addition, given the limited human attention span, marketing campaigns designed to deliver mental availability need to run consistently for a long time (measured in years) to optimise their effectiveness.
Attributes compound, and a challenger has no decades of equity to draw on.
How does the funnel make a sponsorship fundable?
It gives you a diagnosis, and it gives you a forecast.
Map it honestly:
Market size
Aware of you
Considering you
In conversation with you
Banking with you
Staying with you
Measure the conversion rate at each step, and you have a picture of what is delivering your business today. It arrives already calibrated in money because its bottom is revenue.
For a challenger bank, the likely weak point is awareness-to-consideration, for a specific reason: people have heard of Revolut but have not yet decided to trust it with their money.
I am reasoning from that category, since no one has shown me a funnel, and the diagnosis is the part any brand-side reader can run on their own numbers.
Then the forecast. Hold everything constant, model what happens if that one conversion rate moves from where it is to where it should be, and you have the whole argument in one line. This lever, this movement, this commercial outcome.
The CFO then gets a single slide showing market size, where you convert, where you don’t, the step you’re targeting and what moving it is worth.
CFOs value this simple transparency and become marketing advocates quickly when they collaborate in this way.
“The request stops being a defence of a spend and becomes a proposal with a number on it.”
Why should Audi market to itself first?
Because the fan side of the team is a free lab for the capability the brand side has to sell.
Every team runs two marketing operations. One is aimed at fans. The other is aimed at partners, through acquisition, servicing and renewal.
The second one is where the money is, and the first one is where you can practise without a client watching.
What that looks like for Audi:
Build its own distinct positioning, deciding what the team wants to be known for with fans, picking attributes it believes are true, ownable and difficult for its competition to replicate.
Measure where it sits on each one against the rest of the grid
Map the fan funnel and find the conversion step holding it back
Set an objective, pull a lever, check whether the score moved
Do it for a year, with its own data
To be clear about what this is: Audi has said nothing publicly about running attribute tracking on its own fan base, and I am arguing for what the team could do rather than reporting what it does.
The Revolut deal does carry a version of the instinct. Revolut Business is being integrated into the team’s own financial operations, so the team runs its money on the partner’s product and finds out what it is like to be the customer. The same logic extends straight into how the team markets itself.
For existing partners, it can also stay transparent about what is moving and what is stuck, and the link between activity and outcomes is what makes a partner reinvest year after year and let the effect compound.
UBS and Mercedes are what that looks like with time on it. Fourteen years in, renewed again in 2024, with a global brand platform built on craft that puts the team’s own technical direction and drivers on screen as the proof.
The timing is the opportunity. The principles of marketing science and effectiveness are now well proven. The sport’s commercial growth has been quick enough that the rigour around it has room to catch up, and the first team to close that distance holds a differentiator the grid cannot copy at speed.
Do this on Monday
Brand-side: turn your positioning into attributes you want to be known for, then ask your research partner where you sit today. If nobody can tell you, that is the first job.
Team-side: run the positioning-to-attributes exercise on your own brand before you take it to anyone else’s.