Future of Marketing Briefing: SharkNinja’s McLaren deal treats F1 fandom as the asset

“This” is a five-year sponsorship of McLaren and it got off to an early start. F1 sponsors tend to arrive over the winter, ready for their logos to be unveiled on the new car in February. SharkNinja turned up in mid-September, with most of the season already run, because it asked McLaren whether anything could go live before the year was out. McLaren said yes, which hands the brand a few months of practice ahead of 2027. 

The practice matters since SharkNinja has never backed a sports property this big. Its previous sports deals were built around a single moment. At the 2025/1015 Women’s Rugby World CUp it was an official appliance partner, running standards at match venues, a fan zone at Battersea Power Station and a social series on matchday prep. A year earlier it put Thierry Henry, Peter Crouch and Bastian Schweinsteiger on a faux video call to squabble over who could host the best Euro 2024 watch party. Both were finished within weeks. McLaren, on the other hand, gave SharkNinja four racing series for five years. McLaren engineers in its labs and a direct line to drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri. 

That last part is what Dyer is most focused on. Where Norris and Piastri do appear, she wants them helping shape the idea, which is a change from the old sponsor routine of a driver turning up, reading the lines and leaving. “Getting them to do the things that they’re comfortable with is way better than handing someone a script and saying ‘there you go’,” Dyer continued. Fans follow the drivers as closely as the teams these days so keeping both onside matters. That goes double for a brand hoping to win those fans over on social media. 

Most of that content will run on Mclaren’s channels and SharkNinja’s, and nothing goes live until both sides have signed it off. Even then, it won’t automatically land on Norris or Piastri’s accounts. “Their channels are theirs to own and theirs to editorialize,” said Dyer. If Norris or Piastri’s post about a blender, it’ll be because they fancied it.  

That puts the onus on the content itself, though Dyer was frank that SharkNinja’s yardstick for it is still rough. Her answer on engagement, she warned, would be “really wooly.” Comments, shares and dwell time all go into the mix, weighed together, with reach a step behind. F1 and McLaren fans are fiercely loyal and Dyer said the brand is “really respectful of that”. Success as she put it, is a fan seeing a post and thinking. “‘oh yeah, like wicked. I totally get it’. Rather than this feels like advertising.”

Further out, SharNinja will track brand recognition and whether putting McLaren behind a specific product line shifts sales. As Dyer explained: “When we go hard at a product line with McLaren, we want to see whether or not that changes the trajectory of sales.”

Down the line, McLaren could even have a hand in the products as well the marketing. A set number of hours a year, the team’s engineers sit with SharkNina’s in Needham, Massachusetts, to “literally pen to paper solve problems together,” as Dyer put it. Battery life is one area they’ll dig into. Whether anything ends up with McLaren’s name on the box is an open question, and one Dyer didn’t answer. The engineering link was a big part of why SharkNinja picked McLaren, though. The brand is “really obsessive about the concept of marginal gains,” she said. “If we can get a battery to last like 50 seconds longer or get a fan to be 10% more efficient, we’ll do it.”

Sports sponsorship has been heading this way for a while. Live sport is one of the few remaining moments when a huge audience watches the same thing at once, and brands have been paying more to be part of it. What they’re buying has changed with the price. A logo on the hoardings and ad slots in the broadcast used to be the deal. These days marketers want to know what the fans themselves are worth, whether those fans follow the team or the people in its cars and kits.

“We operate more like an agency than a lot of traditional rights holders in that we insight on entering every conversation talking about the brand first,” said Ryan Fischer, president at Fenway Sports Management on an Advertising Week New York panel earlier this month. [We’re] understanding their objectives and strategies, then trying to identify the insight, whether that’s a consumer insight or a story we can help amplify, and letting that lead where we go within the portfolio rather than starting withoutselves.”

Notes from the cutting room

SharkNinja’s appearance in the F1 movie predated Dyer’s arrival but she was there to help execute it. Before it came out, she said “people saw us as Shark and Ninja”, said Dyer. Afterward, it was ‘Oh, they’re SharkNina,” she continued. The fan response caught the team off guard. “We were all pleasantly surprised by the sentiment and engagement with our brand in that movie by a fan base that I think really got us,” Dyer said. “That was definitely the inflection point to say okay, we should go further into the sport.”

The aim of it, like most sponsorships of this scale, is younger fans. Yes, F1’s global audience tops 900 million worldwide but the brand isn’t trying to carve that up — at least not yet. As Dyer put it: “We’re here for everyone, truthfully, and we want to stay for everyone.”

The scariest thing in advertising? A Cheetos demon (apparently)

Forget the holiday season, it’s the Halloween campaigns you want to get right.

What’s scarier for a marketer: a campaign that fails to scare anyone, or a campaign that scares its audience so much they never want to buy the product again?

For Cheetos, apparently, the answer is a demon covered in orange snack dust.

The brand’s latest Halloween ad, “Man at The Bottom of The Bag” was ranked the ninth-scariest ad of all time by creative and media intelligence platform DAIVID. The spot, which is part of Cheetos’ Flavor of Fear collaboration with horror studio Blumhouse Productions, is predicted to leave 15.3% of viewers experiencing intense fear. Even HBO Max’s Halloween trailer, which promotes its season of spooky films, ranked 10th.

It turns out Halloween ads are (shockingly) losing some of their bite. This year’s campaigns were 32% less likely to provoke intense fear than those released in 2025 according to DAIVID — which means they’re less scary, sure, but not necessarily less effective.

DAIVID compiled the ranking using its AI-powered creative intelligence technology, which predicts the emotional responses audiences are likely to have towards ads, as well as its potential impact on brand and business metrics. And ads were ranked according to the percentage of viewers predicted to experience intense fear, defined as an emotional response score between eight and 10 on a 10-point scale.

Which begs the question, what came top of the all-time scary ads chart?

In first place was 2025’s I Choose Freedom campaign: “End The Horror”, which predicted 24.5% of viewers would feel intense fear after watching it.

Second place went to 2025’s Universal: “Dare To Answer The Black Phone”, which predicted 21.6% of viewers would experience intense fear.

Third place went to the Six Flags: “Tick, Tick, Tick” from 2024, where 19.5% of viewers were predicted to experience intense fear.

• 4th place: 2025’s Hatch: “Goodnight, Phone”, 18.9% of viewers expected to feel scared
• 5th place: 2025’s Sixt: “Renting With Competitors Can Be Horror”, with 18.6% of viewers predicted to feel scared
• 6th place: 2010’s Alton Towers: Th13teen TV Advert — no surprise that 17.9% of viewers were expected to feel the fear
• 7th place: 1973’s The Central Office of Information: “Lonely Water”, which predicted 17.5% of scared viewers
• 8th place: 2025’s Disney+: “Huluween” — which expected 15.3% of viewers would likely feel intense fear.

And let’s not forget Cheetos in ninth place, followed by HBO Max in 10th.

Still, there is some good news. The average Creative Effectiveness Score, according to DAIVID, sat at 5.84 out of 10 last year, and rose slightly to 5.85 for 2026.

Simply put, scaring the living daylights out of consumers can remain optional. But making the ad work is the real trick — or treat.

What we’ve heard

“Given that there is almost never only one perfect option for a decision, we’re confident that we can actually provide really interesting, compelling advertising models for agentic use cases… I’m really actually excited about the advertising opportunities in an agentic world.”

— Google’s svp and chief business officer Philipp Schindler, responding to an analyst question about the transition from search to agentic use during the company’s latest earnings call.

Numbers to know

$11.2 billion: Total quarterly ads revenue for YouTube

90 minutes: The new total length of time for horizontal videos on Instagram

30th Oct: The date by which creators must have enrolled in X’s new Video Bonus Program 

15.8%: Percentage of U.S. TV viewing which is now accounted for by YouTube

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