For years, I’ve heard people say that motorsports is “behind the times” when it comes to marketing.

And honestly, in some areas, I 100% agree. As an industry, we can be slow to adapt to social media, digital marketing, content creation, media sharing and the way brands are reaching consumers today by relying on logo placements instead of genuine interactions. There are still PLENTY of teams and series depending on the same old sponsorship strategies they’ve used for decades without really evolving.

But there’s one area where I actually think motorsports has been ahead of the curve for a long time: long-term relationships.

I recently came across this article from Net Influencer that asked 50 experts what brands should change about their creator strategies for the second half of this year. One of the biggest themes throughout the responses was the shift away from one-off creator campaigns and toward longer-term relationships, ongoing partnerships, authenticity and building something that goes beyond a single post or campaign.

And as I read through it, I kept thinking: we have been doing this forever.

Sponsorship Has Never Really Been About One Post

If you’ve been around motorsports for any amount of time, you know that the best sponsor relationships usually aren’t built around a single race or a single social media post. Yes, there are lots of single-race deals, but they usually are a one-and-done, and I hate that. It really does put a bad taste in a brand’s mouth when they are disappointed from over-promised on deliverables because the driver, team, or series simply doesn’t understand the real value they can provide.

What we typically see happen is a sponsor might start with a driver for one season by providing a discount, but if the relationship works, it turns into a second season with a higher discount and some free product, then a third season with a larger product budget, then five years later they are sending that same driver funding and product. Over time, the driver doesn’t just put the brand’s logo on their car; they learn the ins-and-outs of the brand, they understands the company’s goals and the people behind the brand, and eventually the partnership becomes much more natural.

The brand becomes part of the driver’s story. The driver’s identity becomes synonymous with the company’s name.

And it all starts with the driver developing the relationship and being genuinely interested in helping out the company. Yes, they put a decal on their car, but it goes further than that. They try to find new customers or retailers to sell the products, they help with product development, they purchase a commercial spot in their series’ live streaming or magazine and give it to the brand for free, they create giveaways and ride-alongs to collect leads (fan’s contact information), they offer to have their car on display at a trade show.

It takes time, but most importantly, it takes trust. The driver has to trust that the brand will want to stay with their team for the long run and increase support over the years, and the brand has to trust that the driver will over-deliver and help them expand their presence, while being a positive brand ambassador.

That’s something I think motorsports has always understood, even if we haven’t always done a great job of explaining the value of it to sponsors.

The Problem Is That The Algorithm Doesn’t Care

Our industry has a huge advantage by always focusing on relationships first, especially now that we’re entering a time when the creator economy is realizing that audiences don’t necessarily respond to the biggest reach or the most polished piece of sponsored content. They respond to people they know and trust (and trust takes a long time to develop, especially with AI merging with original content).

And juuuuuust when we think we’ve got the algorithm hacked, the platforms change. The type of content people want to consume changes. A creator can build an audience doing one or two really good formats for years, and then suddenly realize that the content that used to perform isn’t reaching the same people anymore.

We’ve all watched it happen. Instagram changes what it pushes. Facebook changes how much organic content people see. TikTok changes what gets distributed. YouTube changes what keeps people watching. And then consumer behavior changes along with it.

Creators always have to adapt, and brands also have to adapt with them.

This is where I think brands overall can get themselves into trouble when they build their entire creator strategy around a specific deliverable or a specific platform. If the entire partnership is based on getting five Instagram posts and those five posts don’t perform the way they did a year ago, suddenly the brand thinks the partnership isn’t working.

But what if the relationship is still working? What if the creator has become a valuable ambassador for the brand? What if the content simply needs to evolve?

That’s why I think the relationship matters more than the platform.

You can create the exact same type of content you’ve been creating for years and get completely different results because the platform changed, the algorithm changed or your audience’s behavior changed. (Un)fortunately, social media just makes those changes happen much faster. And this is another place where long-term sponsorship relationships have an advantage.

If a brand has worked with a driver or creator for three years, the answer to a change in performance doesn’t have to be, “This isn’t working anymore. Let’s find someone else.” Instead, it can be, “Okay, what’s changing? What is the audience responding to now? What can we try next?”

The content strategy can change without throwing away the relationship. You don’t have to start over, you simply get to evolve together.

However, we see in motorsports, and other sports as well with sponsored athletes, that sometimes things don’t evolve and the relationship diminishes. When there’s no recognizing that things in the marketing world have changed, and what used to work now falls flat, it can negatively impact the relationship, especially when budgets get cut.

And that leads to deals getting smaller or cut alltogether, because the relationship wasn’t prioitized. Instead one party treated the sponsorship as more of a transaction instead of a true partnership. This is where a long-term partnership allows you to ask much better questions to deepen the relationship and make both parties successful, because you’re not just trying to get more exposure but instead trying to learn about the brand’s customers and their buying decisions.

Ask questions like what did we learn about the audience? What content performed best? What activations got us the most leads? What did fans respond to? How can we use the relationship in other parts of the business? What could we do next season that we couldn’t have done this season?

Where Motorsports Has an Advantage – and Where We Still Need to Improve

This is the part that I think the motorsports industry sometimes doesn’t recognize. I hear how motorsports needs to become more like the creator economy and focus more on advertising with content creators, but in some ways, the creator economy is moving toward what motorsports has been doing for years.

Motorsports is a community. Fans see the same brand on the car week after week, hear the driver talk about the product, see the team using it behind the scenes and watch that partnership become part of their success. Over time, the brand becomes familiar, and that familiarity creates a level of trust that is difficult to replicate with a one-off campaign.

Where I think motorsports still needs to catch up is in proving the value of those relationships. We’ve historically focused on things like logo placement, number of races, certain number of social posts, attendance and media exposure. Those things DO matter, but they don’t tell the entire story.

If we’re going to tell brands that long-term relationships are more valuable than one-time transactions, we need to be able to show them WHY. We need better data, better reporting and better storytelling around what a partnership actually generates over an entire season, not just what happened with one post or one race.

I don’t think the future of sponsorship is choosing between relationships and data. It’s combining the strengths of both. The relationship creates the long-term value, while the data helps us understand and prove it.

The platforms will change, the algorithms will change, and the content that works today probably won’t be the content that works three years—or even three months—from now. That’s okay. If you’ve built a strong partnership, you don’t have to start over every time the internet changes. You can change the strategy, the content, the platforms and the deliverables without changing the relationship. And maybe that’s one area where motorsports isn’t behind the creator economy after all. Maybe we’ve been ahead of it the whole time.