Why Hilton stuck with McLaren for almost 20 years without a championship

Hilton liked McLaren before it was cool.

The international hotel brand has been a sponsor of the Formula 1 team for two decades, sticking with them through thick and thin: Last year, McLaren won the Constructors’ Championship, the top honor for an F1 team, for the first time since 1998, and since Hilton has been a sponsor.

Hilton CMO Mark Weinstein wasn’t particularly bothered by the losing streak ahead of last year’s championship win. Being part of a championship team certainly doesn’t hurt, he told us, but a sponsorship can’t be based on a team’s record alone.

“While you wouldn’t back a consistent loser, and while it’s nice to have our brand on a winning team, you have to believe in all the other aspects of the culture and the people, and the other parts of the partnership,” Weinstein told Marketing Brew at the Cannes Lions festival. “It’s a lot more fun to go to a race when they’re winning, but we saw fans that wanted to be there when they weren’t winning because they love McLaren.”

Common ground

Hilton’s partnership with McLaren started with mutual values, Weinstein said during a Cannes panel with McLaren Racing CMO Louise McEwan. Those values boil down to kindness and optimism, he told us later, both of which seem especially on display at McLaren these days. Under the leadership of CEO Zak Brown and supported by the personalities of drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, McLaren has maintained a reputation for being a nice and welcoming team, which is partially by design, according to McEwan. Hilton, meanwhile, was founded with similar principles in mind, Weinstein said.

“We realized the opportunity around inclusivity, being human, being warm, to welcome those new fans in,” McEwan said during the panel. “That’s always been front and center of mind for us as a team.”

Many of those new F1 fans started following the sport after Netflix released its F1 docuseries, Drive to Survive, and, on a separate panel, McEwan said the “Netflix factor” has helped to further “humanize the brand.” The show also adds a little something extra to Hilton’s sponsorship, Weinstein told us. While Hilton has run some ads on Netflix, Weinstein said he doesn’t feel the need to advertise against Drive to Survive because of the attention already being paid to the show.

“We’re getting, essentially, embedded advertisements,” he said. “We bring Paris [Hilton] a lot of times to the races, and she gets great coverage with Lando and the Oscar, so that makes it into the show. You’re seeing us on the [uniforms], you’re seeing us on the car…It plays more naturally than interrupting that show with an advertisement for Hilton.”

Stay a while

Beyond the Hilton logos that appear on McLaren uniforms and car liveries, the brand provides lodging and hospitality services for the entire team when they travel for races, creates social video content with the drivers, and activates through race experiences with fans, Weinstein said.

On the heels of next weekend’s British Grand Prix, Norris’s home race, Hilton is offering a McLaren-themed suite at one of its London properties that fans can book from July 8 through July 20—part of Hilton’s “Stay Like” campaign that has also included Wicked– and Paris Hilton-themed suites.

Weinstein said he views activations like these as perhaps more important than static branding on the cars themselves.

“The livery is probably the least interesting part of it, I’m being honest with you,” he said. “The car should never be slow enough to see our logo. If it’s going too slow, something’s gone wrong.” (With that said, he added, he likes seeing the Hilton logo on the McLaren team’s uniforms.)

Engagement with content featuring the McLaren team is central to the partnership, according to Weinstein. Posts like the “Stay Like a Winner” video starring Norris and Piastri after McLaren won the Constructors’ went viral, and fans also specifically noticed the Hilton brand in a livestream of Norris doing yoga in Miami ahead of his first race win there last year, Weinstein said.

And while hotel bookings are also important, it’s not his primary focus.

“I don’t have an awareness problem,” Weinstein said. “What I have is a depth-of-story opportunity, where not everybody knows about who we are and what we stand for. The fans that McLaren has, our ability to tap into that, can unlock a connection back to us…The main goal is to get people excited and engaged, and then, ultimately, we can convert them later with our marketing tactics.”