{"id":238408,"date":"2021-10-26T14:15:07","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T12:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rtrsports.com\/nba-and-formula-1-when-sports-marketing-goes-cross-platform\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T16:32:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:32:06","slug":"nba-and-formula-1-when-sports-marketing-goes-cross-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rtrsports.com\/en\/blog\/nba-and-formula-1-when-the-sports-marketing-and-cross-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"NBA and Formula 1: when sports marketing goes cross-audience (and what happened next)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Updated September 2026.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Austin 2021: what happened<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What cross-audience marketing is<\/h2>\n

The Austin operation worked across two platforms with different audiences, and this type of strategy has, in textbook terms, two underlying reasons:<\/p>\n