F1 interests young people more than football according to a study by The Insights Family

Since the acquisition of the Formula 1 by Liberty Media in 2017, the premier category of motorsport is putting everything in place to attract a new, younger audience, but also with the aim of popularizing a sport often seen as too elitist. To do this, Liberty Media has developed social networks with strong use of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more recently TikTok. In 2018, Liberty Media launched its on-demand online platform F1TV, allowing you to discover numerous documentaries, reports on the world of F1 as well as the broadcast of live sessions. 

To fully understand the effectiveness of this digital strategy, F1 called on The Insights Family, a market research company focused on children, parents and families. The increase in interest in F1 increased by 17%, from 17.3 million to 20.1 million. For comparison, during the same period, football attracted 6% more fans. F1 would be the second sport with the greatest increase on social networks according to The Insights Family.

“We are thinking about how to be more creative to attract a new audience and popularize the sport that millions of fans love, says Ellie Norman, F1 Marketing and Communications Director. So I'm very happy to see that the work we do is paying off. With the use of digital platforms, we have been able to spread the passion for motorsport to the next generation of fans.”

Formula 1 sent a detailed report on its use of digital platforms using a panel of 162 children aged 774 to 12. In this report, we observe that Generation Z is more interested in esports than in traditional sport, but also that Instagram and TikTok are the places where young people consume the most, well ahead of Facebook and Twitter. Content on official F18 social media has good reviews, including “backstage” which help to better understand sport among young people. People interested in engineering and innovation particularly like the documentaries available on F1 TV. Finally, we see through this report that there is a strong interest among fans in anecdotes about the history of F1, particularly on the evolution of the cars.