Partnerships are forged in fire, or so the saying goes, and for the McLaren Formula 1 team and the cryptocurrency exchange OKX, the beginning of their years-long partnership came about during some less-than-ideal conditions.
The year was 2022, and at the time, crypto was crashing, and McLaren was solidly middle of the pack. “People weren’t really familiar with us in 2022,” OKX Global CMO Haider Rafique told Marketing Brew. “In 2023, people began to be familiar, but they were also focused on the poor performance by McLaren.”
A few years later, things are looking up for both organizations. At the end of 2024, McLaren won its first constructors’ championship in almost three decades, and OKX is looking at a more crypto-friendly administration in the US.
“We wanted to align ourselves to the winning spirit, and when we looked across the grid, McLaren was one of the oldest teams, but they hadn’t won a constructors’ championship since 1998,” OKX Global CMO Haider Rafique told Marketing Brew. “We were like, ’Not only will millions and millions and millions of people repeatedly be exposed to our brand through the McLaren F1 partnership, but more importantly, if they crack a win, gosh, we’re going to look like heroes. We’re going to look like we were part of that journey.’”
Pit stop
Part of that journey included establishing a new brand identity. Shortly before the partnership with McLaren, OKX had rebranded from OKEx, and brand awareness was “very low, almost negative,” Rafique said. Beyond that, the crypto industry was struggling to reach people outside of “crypto natives,” he said, in part because of restrictions limiting the platforms they could advertise on.
“Distribution in crypto is very challenging,” he said. “When Google doesn’t allow you to serve ads, when Microsoft doesn’t allow you to serve ads, when Facebook makes it very difficult…you only just have two channels: the Apple App Store and X.”
Enter sports marketing, which Rafique called “the ultimate distribution channel.” In 2022, OKX became a global partner of Manchester City, resulting in 6 billion impressions during the first year of the deal, according to Rafique. But he wanted to go beyond soccer and was convinced F1 was a sport to help further grow the brand.
“We needed people to very quickly…find out the name OKX and get exposed to it over and over again,” Rafique said.
The first year of OKX’s deal with McLaren, which includes a front-and-center placement on the drivers’ race suits, a primary position on their helmets, and on the livery of their cars, resulted in 1 billion impressions for OKX, Rafique said.
It’s not just OKX that’s benefiting. “Our partnership with OKX…has also been instrumental in helping us get back to the front of the grid,” McLaren Racing CMO Louise McEwen said in an email. “For the past three years, OKX has believed in our vision for the team—and it’s the investment and commitment from our partners, including OKX, that has enabled us to achieve an incredible turnaround.”
Overtake
After a challenging season for McLaren in 2023, which ended with Ferrari edging it out of the top three in the constructors’, 2024 brought with it “the bull market for McLaren and the bull market for crypto,” Rafique said. In addition to branding on the cars and uniforms, OKX built out additional efforts with McLaren figures in its marketing. Drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri and CEO Zak Brown were featured in OKX’s “My Fabric” campaign, in which athletes, coaches, and sports execs talk about their life stories.
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OKX has also found ways to boost positive brand association, a key KPI for the brand, through its work with McLaren, like redesigning car liveries (aka the cars’ paint jobs) that include sponsor logos. Last year in Monaco, McLaren and OKX collaborated with Senna Brand to create a livery in honor of Brazilian F1 driver Ayrton Senna, who died 30 years ago while racing in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. Rafique said it was very well-received by fans (and that a LinkedIn post announcing the livery was one of his best-performing on the platform).
McEwen said “the Monaco Senna campaign was an extraordinary success and a proud moment for McLaren,” too. In fact, it was the team’s “most successful marketing campaign ever,” she said, having generated more than 470 million impressions, more than 36 million engagements, and almost 180 million video views.
McLaren and OKX’s deal expires at the end of 2026, but Rafique said he would like OKX to extend it another five years beyond that. In 2025, he hopes to work on additional campaigns with Norris, and said he might even have a Super Bowl ad up his sleeve, potentially a PSA giving “a nod to the people who…protected our industry” during the crypto-critical Biden administration.
Super Bowl or not, another two years at least with the F1 team currently atop the podium serves Rafique’s ultimate goal of expanding the audience for OKX and crypto more broadly.
“I really believe for the industry, we’ve got to do the thing that doesn’t come naturally to us,” he said. “Crypto and the crypto bros have been so much in their echo chamber…I don’t want our company to fall into the trap of just speaking to the echo chamber.”
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