Sporting Events + TV Series = Good for Everyone
It took a Netflix series to get Americans to watch Formula 1
Imagine yourself as the marketing leader at Formula 1 and Netflix came to you and said: We will create a TV series about your product and promote the daylights out of it. All you have to do is give us access to your media and people. We will pay for everything.
Pretty darn cool for Formula One. The Netflix series “Drive to Survive” is universally credited for the dramatic increase in demand for Formula 1 in the US. No one outside of Netflix knows the viewership numbers, but it has been reported that “Drive to Survive” is one of the top series on Netflix. Season 5 just dropped and if you are one of the three people alive that has not seen it… you should check it out.
Now imagine yourself as the production person at Netflix and Formula 1 came to you and said: we will give you all of the action footage, a built-in audience worldwide, and you don’t have to pay a single actor. You can make an awesome TV series for even less than a reality TV show.
All future media partnerships will be measured against this new gold standard.
Box to Box, the production company behind “Drive to Survive”, also produced “Full Swing”, a similar series on Netflix about golf, and “Make or Break” a series about surfing for Apple along with several other sports related documentaries. The brains behind these productions is a Brit, James Gay-Rees, who got his start in Formula 1 productions while making “Senna” in 2010. Which is also an incredible film.
SailGP has been producing mini-episodes of their own called “Racing on the Edge”. They are available on YouTube, where season 3 alone has generated about 2 million views.
There are people that think Drive to Survive is taking direction from Formula 1 and is in fact one long commercial. There are others that worry that the TV series is getting more popular than the racing events themselves. And still others that wonder who these shows are made for: the serious technical follower or the uninitiated.
Whether or not these criticisms are valid, the numbers don’t lie. Viewership is up, cost is down. With numbers like these, we will be seeing much more of this new genre of entertainment.
Links and Resources
New York Times about Drive to Survive: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/magazine/formula-1-miami-drive-to-survive.html
Jalopnik on the negative take: https://jalopnik.com/formula-1-drive-to-survive-is-starting-to-feel-even-mo-1850158203
About Senna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senna_(film)
About Box to Box: https://www.boxtoboxfilms.com/filmography
SailGP Racing on the Edge:
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Jay, enjoy your articles, thinks Netflix would be interested in our Tuesday nite J-24 series?