The concept of measurability is a founding principle of modern marketing. Following the golden rule that “if it’s measurable, it’s improvable,” numbers, data, and reports of every kind have rapidly become the cornerstone of any business strategy. Modernity has given new life to this idea: we are immersed in a media ecosystem where the number of streams, views, followers, and impressions provides a real-time measure of success — or at least, that is the premise.

I sponsor, but what is the return on investment?

When it comes to sponsorship, the concept of measurement becomes more layered. There are numerous performance indicators for a sponsorship campaign: from ROI to ROO, ROE, impact on sales, and the Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) — the economic value of the advertising a brand would need to purchase to achieve equivalent visibility.

AVE, one of the tools that best communicates the value immediately generated by sponsorship, is calculated by multiplying brand exposure visibility — expressed in seconds — by total audience and the cost of one second of advertising. It is a formula that produces a figure of great precision. And precisely for this reason, the number it is based on carries enormous weight: the calculation of the television audience.

Today, every mid-to-high-level sports property has accurate and up-to-date audience figures, provided by leagues or television rights holders. Not only the number of viewers is known, but also their geographic origin, demographic profile, and viewing habits. Yet it is precisely when audience measurement has become so precise and granular that the very concept of audience has been called into question.

In essence, what is a television viewer of a sporting event?

There is no standard, universally recognised definition of “viewer.” And even if there were, it would not answer other questions about repeat viewing, time-shifted viewing, or mediated viewing.

The concept of “audience” we are used to derives from a television tradition that is about forty years old. In common usage — especially in a country like Italy where the expression “Auditel data” has become part of everyday vocabulary — the audience is the total number of people who followed a given television programme for at least one consecutive minute. It is a concept so deeply ingrained that it is rarely reflected upon, even though the situation is far more complicated, and the audience of a sporting event is not always calculated in this way.

Consider the simple example of a MotoGP or Formula 1 Grand Prix. I, as a viewer, sit down on the sofa and turn on the TV to watch the race live, but after two minutes a commitment forces me to leave home. I try to follow the race on my phone, but the signal is poor and I give up. I catch it the same evening by watching the replay. The news broadcast that follows includes a long segment showing the highlights and the most exciting overtaking manoeuvres. Before going to bed, I watch ten minutes of a commentary programme dedicated to the race.

How many times have I watched the sporting event?

How many individual minutes of viewing — across different channels and devices — have I generated for the same event? The concept of cumulative audience, which measures the total audience generated by all viewing opportunities for a given event (highlights, news broadcasts, replays, in-depth programmes, social media clips), says that I am five different “viewers.” It is a legitimate statistical abstraction, but it produces numbers that require considerable caution in interpretation.

The curious case of the Formula 1 audience

The issue of cumulative audience for sporting events began to raise eyebrows when, at the end of the 1999 World Championship, Formula 1 released global audience figures, proudly declaring it had attracted 57.8 billion viewers. An interesting number, particularly on a planet that at the time had 6.5 billion people. More than a few eyebrows were raised among sponsors and industry insiders: how credible can an audience figure be that is ten times the world’s population?

For this very reason, in 2004 Formula 1 hired Michael Payne, a marketing expert with over twenty years of experience at the International Olympic Committee. It was Payne who grasped the nettle, providing the definition of “viewer” that for years remained the reference standard in F1 television measurements: a viewer is any person who has watched at least 15 minutes — not necessarily consecutive — of Formula 1 during the course of a season.

After recalculating using this clearer — and more sponsor-friendly — definition, Formula 1 announced its new viewing figures. Majestic numbers that in 2008 reached the extraordinary figure of 600 million unique viewers. The circus had officially become the “most-watched annual sports series” in the world: the most-watched annual sporting event on the planet, surpassed only by the Olympics and the Football World Cup, which are held every four years.

However, 2008 was also the peak of a curve that would from then on begin to decline relentlessly. From 600 million it fell to 520 million in 2009, 500 million in 2012, and 400 million in 2015. In seven years the world’s most popular sport had lost a third of its audience: an impressive haemorrhage in both scale and speed.

The media began to question F1 leadership about what was happening. The board’s response was, once again, to point the finger at incorrect audience measurement: the decline was not due to an actual fall in viewers, but to the fact that they had begun using digital viewing systems that were difficult to measure with old methods. What the graph did not openly show was the role of certain structural factors: the shift of rights to pay-per-view platforms, the absence of genuine on-track competition, and the introduction of anonymous circuits at the expense of some historic venues.

Liberty Media, Drive to Survive and the numbers puzzle

The trend did not reverse even when ownership of the sport passed from Bernie Ecclestone to the Liberty Media Group. In the first year of the new management, the audience fell by a further 10 million. And on 5 January 2018, an official press release published the 2017 figures with a statement as strange as it was revealing: “352.3 million unique viewers watched F1 at least once — the first year since 2010 that this number has not declined.” How could Formula 1 have lost almost 250 million viewers from its 2008 peak and officially declare a triumph?

The explanation was, once again, methodological. Previous data had been calculated by collecting figures from the 10 largest global territories and interpolating them to simulate the total for 200 countries reached by the signal. Under the new Liberty management, the territories actually monitored rose to 63. Applying this method retrospectively, previous years’ figures proved to be inflated, and 2017 appeared “in line with previous corrected years.” The mathematics was, in its own way, consistent. The communication, deliberately opaque.

Into this context came one of the most significant events in recent Formula 1 history: the 2019 launch of the Netflix series Drive to Survive. The documentary — built around the behind-the-scenes of the paddock, internal team conflicts, and drivers’ personal stories — reached an entirely different audience from the traditional one. No longer just motorsport enthusiasts: young people, families, and above all Americans, in a market that F1 had for decades ignored. The commercial response was swift: in 2023 the calendar included three Grand Prix in the United States for the first time.

Liberty Media’s response to the resulting numbers did not surprise the most attentive observers. In 2022, Formula 1 Management published a global survey declaring the existence of 1.5 billion fans worldwide. A figure that — as seen in 1999 with the 57.8 billion cumulative viewers — deserves to be read with appropriate critical attention. “Fan” is not a television “viewer.” “Viewer” is not the same as an Auditel spectator. These are three different measures, built with three different methodologies, answering three different questions. The problem is that they are communicated — and often received — as if they were equivalent.

What remains useful for a sponsor

The controversy over Formula 1’s audience is a valuable case study for anyone involved in sports sponsorship. It teaches that audience data should never be read without first understanding the methodology by which it was produced. It teaches that comparing data from different years is only possible if the methodology has remained constant. Above all, it teaches that the real growth of a property can occur through channels that old measurement tools do not capture — and this is not necessarily a problem, provided that sponsors and agencies have the awareness needed to distinguish signal from noise.

Formula 1 in the 2020s has probably recovered some of the audience lost in the previous decade, through new channels — streaming, social media, events in formerly marginal markets — that make comparison with historical data difficult and often misleading. What remains certain is that the question how many people have truly watched Formula 1? is even more complicated than the official answer suggests. And this awareness, for anyone sitting down at a Formula 1 sponsorship negotiation table, is worth more than any stated figure.

Frequently asked questions on sports audience and sponsorship