Starburst’s business has nothing to do with racing.
The company sells enterprise intelligence software, letting large organisations query and act on data spread across cloud, on-premises and hybrid systems without moving it first.
Until this month, it had never signed a single sports sponsorship of any kind.
That changed with a two-year deal naming reigning Formula 1 world champion Lando Norris as brand ambassador, built around a campaign called ‘Ask. Know. Go.’
For Megan Maslanka, Starburst’s Chief Business Operations Officer, the prospect of F1 and McLaren Mastercard Team driver Norris changed all that.
“Every large enterprise right now is trying to operationalise AI, and almost all of them hit the same three walls,” she told Sector.
“They can’t ask a meaningful question of their own data, they can’t fully trust the answer they get back, and even when they can, they can’t act on it with the speed their businesses need.
“Motorsport is where that exact challenge plays out in public, in real time, at the highest possible stakes. As a top-performer, Lando is constantly asking questions, pulling in every available signal, and building the clearest possible picture before he commits to a decision.
“That is our ‘Ask. Know. Go’ sequence. We didn’t have to force an analogy onto him. It already existed in how he competes.”
Norris already carries one of the busiest personal sponsorship portfolios on the grid, spanning Ralph Lauren, Tumi, Bell, PlayStation, Monster and Richard Mille.
Rather than compete with any of those brands for attention, Maslanka said Starburst is targeting an audience none of them are speaking to.
“Lando’s existing portfolio spans lifestyle, fashion, gaming and luxury,” she said.
“We’re not trying to win attention in that lane and we’re not competing with those brands for the same shelf space. Starburst is the first partner from the enterprise data and AI category to align with him, and the audience we care about isn’t the general sports fan.
“It’s the CIOs, Chief Data Officers, VPs of data platforms, and data engineers who have to make AI actually work inside a real company, plus the CFOs and CEOs being asked to defend AI spend to their boards.”
Maslanka’s argument here cuts against the standard sponsorship playbook.
Most brand tie-ups lean on visibility, a driver’s face and reach doing the work of getting a logo remembered.
Starburst is explicitly not chasing that. Its target buyer already sits several steps removed from anything resembling sports fandom, and Maslanka believes that the thing worth borrowing from Norris isn’t attention but a working method that happens to map cleanly onto the problem Starburst sells a solution for.
That also explains the order in which the campaign came together.
Rather than building a message and then casting a driver to front it, Starburst says the underlying argument, that most enterprise AI failures are a data problem rather than a model problem, existed well before Norris did. The partnership’s job was translation, not invention.
“Lando’s own description of how he competes, that most of his performance comes from preparation and understanding the details before he acts, is a more credible explanation of what governed data access does for an enterprise than anything we could put in a slide deck,” said Maslanka.
“The strategic narrative came first. We had already defined the problem: enterprise AI doesn’t fail because of the models, it fails because the data underneath them hasn’t been engineered to support it.
“Ask. Know. Go. is our answer to that: ask any question of any data, know the answer is trustworthy, go act on it before the moment passes.
“While we’ve been building toward that strategic vision for years, the timing aligned as we developed the campaign language at the same time our partnership with Lando was coming together.
“He inspired us and helped us realise how we can connect the narrative with a CIO, a CTO, or any business leader trying to build an intelligent organization, not just a technically correct one.”
A first-time sports sponsor naming a world champion as ambassador looks, on its face, like a straightforward awareness play, the kind of deal any brand with budget to spend might do to get its name in front of a bigger audience.
Maslanka doesn’t dispute that awareness matters here. She disputes that it’s the point.
“Both, and they’re not in tension,” she replied when asked if the partnership was aimed at enterprise buyers who happen to watch F1, or is it more about broader brand awareness.
A board member may never have heard of federated queries or data virtualisation, but a large number of them have heard of Lando Norris.
Megan Maslanka
“Broad brand awareness is what makes the enterprise conversation possible in the first place.
“A board member may never have heard of federated queries or data virtualisation, but a large number of them have heard of Lando Norris.
“When the people managing data platforms and AI infrastructure bring Starburst into a conversation with their leadership team, that name recognition, and that shared instinct, does real work. So the awareness is the door. The substance is what happens once someone walks through it.”
The two-year length of the deal reflects the same logic.
Enterprise sales cycles in Starburst’s category typically run long, board-level AI infrastructure decisions aren’t made off a single campaign cycle, and Maslanka frames the term less as a standard sponsorship duration and more as a minimum runway for the kind of category recognition Starburst is actually after.
“Any partnership like this only works if both sides are clear on commitment and terms going in, and two years is the length that gave us that,” she said.
“It’s long enough to prove this is more than a single moment, and it’s a real horizon to build against rather than a one-off campaign.
“Success at the end of it looks like Starburst being a name that data and AI leaders recognize without us having to explain the category first.
“It also means Lando’s own positioning as a builder and entrepreneur, not just a competitor, has grown alongside it. We’ve always been interested in a real exchange of value, not just a logo swap.”
