The situation
Smartsheet was a McLaren Formula 1 sponsor with the usual entitlements — logo on the car, hospitality, driver appearances. It bought reach and reminded people the company existed. For a brand trying to say something specific about who it was, that was an expensive way to say very little.
Formula 1 sponsorship is also a legible category. Every logo on the car is a company that paid to be there, and audiences read them as exactly that. Adding one more was never going to change how anyone thought about us.
The idea
Give the space away.
Sponsor X turned Smartsheet's own inventory on the McLaren car into a platform for STEM education nonprofits — the slot a sponsor pays for went to organizations that could never afford it. We kept the sponsorship and surrendered the visibility. It was the first program of its kind in Formula 1.
Two partners led the program: DeadlyScience, which gets STEM resources to remote First Nations students in Australia, and The Hidden Genius Project, which trains Black male youth in technology and entrepreneurship.
Watch the films
What it took
- Convincing internal stakeholders that giving up brand real estate seen by tens of millions was a better use of the asset than keeping it. This was the hard part, and it was an argument about what the brand was for.
- Clearing a structure nobody had run before, inside the sport's commercial rules, with McLaren as a willing partner.
- Building the storytelling around the partners' work rather than the sponsor's generosity.
- Sequencing the launch across race weekend, owned channels, and press so the program read as a commitment rather than a stunt.
The outcome
- 55 million viewers at debut.
- We hired Nielsen to measure it, and it did exactly what we wanted. Through earned media and social, Sponsor X delivered greater reach and more impressions than keeping our own logo on the car would have. We did not trade reach for goodwill — we got more of both. And we landed far more than logo impressions: we told the world what we stood for.
- Contributed to Fast Company naming Smartsheet a 2023 "Brand That Matters."
- Gave sales and recruiting a story about the company's character that no product message could carry.
What I would tell another CMO
The instinct with a sponsorship is to maximize what you extract from it. The better question is what the asset makes possible that nothing else in your budget does. A logo on a car is worth impressions. A logo slot you can hand to someone else is worth a position — and a position is the only thing in marketing that compounds.