Earlier this year, with a cast of 25 and a crew of 30, production on an advert for TeamViewer and the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team was well under way.
Then the location moved continents – and the shoot brought forward.
What had been planned as a shoot in Japan became a shoot in Australia, decided late enough that the crew still had to find locations that would work for two different scenes at the last minute.
It is an extreme example of a problem familiar to anyone creating content around Formula 1.
Race weekends are fixed, access to drivers is tightly controlled, and a sponsor’s opportunity can vanish as quickly as it appears.
The production agency Middle Table, which has built content for F1 partners across teams such as Aston Martin Mercedes and McLaren, has learned to work around exactly that kind of disruption as standard practice.
Many of those relationships have been directly facilitated through Sky Media’s international sales unit, which sells the advertising space and offers production as an option alongside it, fulfilled by Middle Table.
The arrangement also gives the agency access to Sky Media’s audience insights when developing creative.
Fred Fenoulhet, Head of Creative Strategy and Production at Middle Table, said the process starts long before any creative work begins, often with guiding the sponsor itself.
Some brands are entering F1 for the first time and need guidance on how the sport works when it comes to filming and content creation, before a brief can be built properly.
“They can sometimes accidentally send you down the wrong path,” he told Sector. “We really grill those sponsors in terms of what they want to achieve from that piece of content and also how it sits alongside all their other activations.”
Those initial conversations extend well beyond the brief-taking meeting. Fenoulhet said the agency treats a sponsor’s first idea as a starting point for debate rather than an instruction to be executed, pushing back specifically when a brief looks like a standard, off-the-shelf format that could apply to any sport.
“We like to challenge sponsors as well in terms of their thinking, straight off the bat,” he explained.
“We will ask them why they want to go down that route and offer up different solutions as well. I think we almost educate them on the fact that sometimes there’s more opportunity than they think there is when it comes to content. It’s easy to get lost in the noise of Formula 1, and we want to give our clients the best chance to stand out.”
Once a brief has been properly interrogated, the agency moves into internal brainstorming before returning to the client, but rarely with a single proposal. Presenting sponsors with several directions, rather than one polished idea, produces more useful feedback, particularly from newer partners who may not yet know what they want until they see what they don’t.
“We don’t always like to just put forward a single idea, because often they need to see something in front of them to know what they want,” Fenoulhet said.
“More to find out what they hate than what they really like. I think finding out what they really don’t like is much more informative.”
Where the real pressure sits
Jeremy Irwin, Director and Co-Founder of Middle Table, said the biggest constraint on speed rarely comes from the creative process itself.
“The bottleneck can be different depending on the client,” he said.
“Often it can be that approval process. Can the sponsor, usually a large enterprise, actually keep up with the pace of sign-offs required for Formula 1. It can depend on when the F1 team has actually got a filming slot available.”
When timelines compress, the normal order of production stops functioning as intended.
That was precisely the dynamic behind the aforementioned TeamViewer shoot, the agency’s fastest commercial turnaround to date – concept to shoot in two weeks.
“The processes can start stacking up instead of running in a linear order,” Irwin said.
“And that’s when things get more difficult and more expensive.”
Thankfully in this case, Irwin said, Middle Table had in TeamViewer an extremely responsive and flexible client – as well as in Mercedes an accommodating and helpful partner – which made the eventual shoot go smoothly, and the end product look as though it had benefited from a far more measured timeline.
Whilst we might be able to execute a creative on a compressed timeline, often we need to work at a speed that a large company perhaps isn’t accustomed to when it comes to decision-making.
Fred Fenoulhet
The resulting ad follows an IT professional anticipating and responding to everyday office problems before they happen, with George Russell on hand to bring the precision of F1 into the mix.
Fenoulhet said timelines across the industry have shortened considerably, creating friction with sponsors used to slower internal processes.
“Increasingly, timelines are very, very short. That has a huge impact on the creative,” he said. “Whilst we might be able to execute a creative on a compressed timeline, often we need to work at a speed that a large company perhaps isn’t accustomed to when it comes to decision-making.”
A case in point, Fenoulhet pointed to a piece of social content turned around with almost no notice at all.
“I remember a shoot at the Dutch Grand Prix. We had to send a producer, I think we had a day’s notice, and we had to build a kind of blackout studio on a beach and draft the questions – all on the day,” Fenoulhet said.
Sticking to structure
Fenoulhet argued that speed only works when the underlying process is rigid enough to absorb it, rather than the opposite.
He said the discipline required to move fast comes directly from how systematically the agency approaches every brief, regardless of the timeline attached to it.
“It is a very systematic process, as it is in Formula One,” Fenoulhet said.
“If it’s not structured, neither will the creative be. And that really does show on the end product.”
That belief extends to how the agency views F1’s famously fixed structure. Rather than treating the sport’s rigidity as a constraint, Fenoulhet described it as an advantage most sponsors fail to recognise.
“If sponsors looked at Formula One as a gift, not just from an access point of view, but actually look at its rigidity as a gift, it’s all planned out. It’s all fixed,” Fenoulhet said.
“In some ways, there are actually not that many unknowns when it comes to creating content in Formula One. We know when the races are, we know where they are and that very rarely changes.”
Late changes remain the exception that tests that confidence. Fenoulhet admitted that when something does shift close to a deadline, the consequences ripple through the whole production rather than staying contained.
“It can feel like a snowball effect – one minor tweak sends ripples through everything,” Fenoulhet said.
“It can look simple on the surface but the consequences below it are significant and can affect the end product, and it’s up to us to tell the client about that at the start.”
Reactivity
Both founders pointed to a shift in how sponsors now want to use their access, driven by the unpredictability of a live sport.
“Sponsors are becoming more reactive. Reactive to the success of the team that they’re associated with,” Fenoulhet said.
“Whilst we know the race calendar, we don’t know the results. It would be a very boring sport if we did. I think that reactivity is a really good thing.”
Irwin said that shift has a direct commercial driver.
Sponsors increasingly want to capitalise on a season while it is still unfolding, rather than after the fact, which pushes production timelines earlier and earlier into the year.
“They’re asking for the things to be ready sooner than perhaps they would have in the past, because they want to make the most of their sponsorship,” he said.
“Two thirds of the way through the season, you haven’t really capitalised on everything that you could with a sponsorship.”
They’re asking for the things to be ready sooner than perhaps they would have in the past, because they want to make the most of their sponsorship.
Jeremy Irwin
Fenoulhet said that urgency is compounded by the fact that access to drivers is not evenly distributed across a season, making early planning more important than sponsors often assume.
“We don’t want clients to suffer. If they miss their ideal slot with a driver, the opportunity becomes more snatched,” he added.
“You’ve got to really think about that too. Teams want to help, but some slots are better than others.”
Early alignment
Irwin said the clearest way to avoid late disruption is ensuring every stakeholder understands the intended product before creative work begins.
“We have to tell them, as best as possible, from the outset what the creative output is going to look like,” Irwin said.
“All the key stakeholders need a clear idea, with storyboards and planning in place. The client might change their mind if there hasn’t been alignment, and that can have a huge effect. But at the end of the day, we have to make sure we’re delivering something the client is happy with.”
Both Irwin and Fenoulhet returned to the same conclusion from different angles. Speed in F1 is not really about working faster, but about removing the points where delay compounds.
“There are actually not that many unknowns when it comes to creating content in Formula One,” Fenoulhet said.
“If you’re working with someone that really understands creating content under these kind of conditions, we can be optimistic.”
For Irwin, that optimism depends on sponsors accepting a harder truth: the fastest work Middle Table has produced was fast because everyone involved had already agreed on what they were building, long before the crew stepped on set.
“It’s really important for us to try to clearly communicate what they’re going to get,” he said.
“That’s easier said than done, and we adapt our approach to align with their experience, because a lot of companies that sponsor F1 teams aren’t always content-first companies.”
