Austin, October 2021. A half-court basketball set-up appears in the Circuit of the Americas paddock, the drivers go head to head at free throws, on the NBA’s social channels the league’s thirty teams lend their colours to the 2022 Formula 1 cars, and Shaquille O’Neal even turns up on the podium. At the time it looked like folklore. Five years later, with three Grands Prix in the United States and a TV deal with Apple, that move can be read for what it was: a textbook case of cross-audience marketing.

Updated September 2026.

We call cross-audience marketing the strategy through which a brand, or an entire sports property, presents itself to another property’s audience in order to become known and borrow its values. The 2021 partnership between the NBA and Formula 1 had exactly these two goals: to grow F1’s awareness in a country that barely knew it and to associate it with a league Americans regard as a benchmark of excellence. It was not the decisive move, but it was the first step of an approach that we can now measure.

Austin 2021: what happened

The collaboration was announced on 20 October 2021 to celebrate the NBA’s 75th anniversary season and Formula 1’s return to the United States after the Grand Prix was cancelled in 2020. The initiatives were simple and very social: thirty liveries, one for each NBA team, applied to the model of the 2022 car and published on both championships’ channels, and a free-throw challenge between drivers in the paddock, organised with ESPN, with 20,000 dollars going to charity. It was won by Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll and Sebastian Vettel, while the best individual score was Daniel Ricciardo’s 7 out of 10. On the podium, where Max Verstappen was celebrating victory, stood Shaquille O’Neal.

The context helped: the circuit announced 400,000 attendees across the weekend, at the time a record for a Grand Prix, and the rivalry between Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton was producing one of the closest championships in decades.

What cross-audience marketing is

The Austin operation worked across two platforms with different audiences, and this type of strategy has, in textbook terms, two underlying reasons:

• increasing awareness, that is, putting the brand in front of people who do not know it;
• value association, that is, making the qualities of the host property reflect on the guest brand.

In 2021 Formula 1 needed both in the United States, a market that had hosted it for decades without ever truly loving it, used as it was to ovals, Indianapolis and Daytona.

First goal: awareness

It may seem strange to a European, but in 2021 not all of North America knew Formula 1. In a country so vast and layered, in origins, cultures and consumer habits, the first item on the agenda was getting known. And the NBA was a first-rate channel: according to projections by commissioner Adam Silver reported by CNBC, the league was heading for a season of around 10 billion dollars in revenue, and the 2021 Finals between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Phoenix Suns had averaged 9.9 million viewers per game, still far below the 20.4 million of 2017, the year of the Warriors and the Cavaliers.

Why the NBA and not the NFL, which dominates American sport? There were probably two reasons. The NBA season was starting again in those very days, with all the media attention that comes with it. And basketball, unlike American football, has a global audience, in Europe and Asia too, where the content would find listeners anyway.

Second goal: filling the empty box

In the eyes of the American viewer, Formula 1 was a kind of empty box. The circus had not had the time, and above all the tradition, to build in the minds of the US public the set of associations that in Europe has settled over seventy years. Bringing it close to a sport deeply rooted in American culture was the fastest way to give it an identity, cognitive but also emotional.

The NBA was a perfect fit: international, modern, extremely wealthy, culturally diverse, run with a long-term vision first by David Stern and, since 2014, by Adam Silver. Putting it next to Formula 1 meant lending it some of those values. Anyone expecting thousands of new fans after a free-throw contest had not understood the game: these effects are measured in years, not weekends.

Five years later: the numbers

The years have indeed passed. The Miami Grand Prix arrived in 2022, Las Vegas in 2023, and today the United States hosts three races a season, with contracts running to 2034 for Austin and to 2041 for Miami. On ESPN the average audience per race rose from 554,000 in 2018 to 948,000 in 2021, reaching a record 1.3 million in 2025. According to Nielsen, there were 52 million Formula 1 fans in the United States in 2024.

The next step was a change of broadcast home: on 17 October 2025 Formula 1 announced a five-year agreement with Apple, which since 2026 has shown the championship exclusively in the United States, a deal we analysed in detail in our piece on the Apple and Formula 1 agreement. Meanwhile the NBA signed its own new media contract, announced in July 2024: eleven seasons with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon, with a value reported by the press at around 76 billion dollars.

From the NBA to Hollywood: the lesson has been learned

If the NBA collaboration was a first experiment, Formula 1 then turned cross-audience into a method. The film F1, released in June 2025 with Brad Pitt, grossed more than 634 million dollars worldwide and won the Oscar for best sound. Cadillac, the eleventh team approved in March 2025, unveiled the livery of its first car with a commercial during the Super Bowl on 8 February 2026, America’s most-watched advertising stage. Then there are toys and family entertainment, with the LEGO and Hot Wheels ranges and the collaboration with Disney, extended in August 2026 until 2028 with the characters of Pixar’s Cars. Even the platforms swap audiences: in 2026 Drive to Survive arrived on Apple TV and the Canadian Grand Prix was also shown on Netflix.

The logic is always the same as in Austin: go where the audience already is, instead of waiting for it to come on its own.

What it teaches brands

Cross-audience marketing is not a privilege reserved for major leagues. Every sponsorship is, at heart, a loan of audience and values: a brand enters the world of a team or a championship to speak to people it would not reach on its own, and to be credited with qualities it could not claim on its own. The NBA and Formula 1 case adds two caveats. First: the effects are slow, and an activation must be judged over the long term. Second: it only works if the two worlds have something in common, because the host audience must see the guest as credible.

For anyone looking at the American market, Formula 1’s journey is a valuable map, which is why we have covered it both by analysing how F1’s competitiveness opens the US market and by studying MotoGP’s expansion plan in the United States. Anyone who wants to understand how to bring their brand along this path can start from our page on Formula 1 sponsorship and from the data of the Global F1 Fan Survey. America is not conquered in a weekend. But, as in Austin in 2021, you can start with a good first step.

Sources: NBA, announcement of the partnership with Formula 1; ESPN, the Austin free-throw challenge; CNBC, NBA revenue 2021-22; NBA, 2021 Finals viewership; ESPN, record F1 viewership in 2025; Formula 1, Apple broadcast partner in the US; Box Office Mojo, F1 film box office; NBA, the new media agreements.