How a former F1 marketer is building fandom for Formula E

This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here.

Growing up on a farm in Surrey, a county in southeast England, Ellie Norman spent a lot of time around tractors. They’re about as different from a racecar as a vehicle can get (not to mention much slower), but from a young age, Norman knew she wanted to get behind the wheel of something.

“I always had this sense of wanting to be able to drive anything that had an engine,” Norman, who would later go on to market for Formula 1 and Formula E, told Marketing Brew.

Norman started working in the agency world when she was 18, using her early savings to buy a Porsche 968 Clubsport. In 2007, she got her race license, which allowed her to compete in some “low-level national racing,” she said. In 2017, she became the director of marketing for Formula 1, where she’d remain for four and a half years.

When Norman joined the organization in its pre-Drive to Survive days, her goal was to “revitalize Formula 1 for a new generation.” Almost a decade later, Formula 1 has seen a resurgence that seems to be the envy of the sports world—and Norman is now CMO of Formula E, the motorsport championship for electric cars. Her goals for Formula E, which she joined just over a year ago, are arguably bigger than the ones she had at F1.

“One of the things I’ve spoken about inside the organization is, ‘How do we become the defining motorsport for youth culture?’” Norman said. “That’s a very deliberate set of words, but for me, youth culture isn’t about age. It literally is an attitude.”

Race a mile in my car

Norman’s focus on youth is rooted in the existing demographics of Formula E fans, 57% of whom are under the age of 40, she said. Psychographically, the sport’s core audience is “very values-driven,” especially when it comes to sustainability, as well as “open-minded and progressive,” Norman said.

Formula E has a 50/50 gender split in fandom, which, she noted, is “unusual for motorsport;” Formula 1 has around a 60/40 split, with a similar breakdown in Nascar fandom. For Norman growing up, she said, Formula 1 was on TV in her home every Sunday, but she’s aware that not everyone will have the same connection to motorsports that she does.

“We need to take Formula E out of the echo chamber that we exist in today and really show up in culture where our audience is,” she said.

Earlier this year, Norman’s team developed a social series called Evo Sessions, in which creators were paired up with each of the 11 Formula E teams to learn to drive championship cars. The creators came from different backgrounds, including tech and fashion, which was meant to promote awareness for Formula E in communities that might not be familiar with the sport, Norman said.

Sure enough, content from the Evo Sessions racked up 282 million views and reached 21 million Instagram accounts, 94% of which were new audiences for the brand, she said. Formula E’s social video views in the 2024–25 season increased by 47% year over year, with Evo Sessions making up 42% of total views for the season, according to the organization. Total social impressions, meanwhile, increased by 14% to almost 1.4 billion, while follower count rose by 10%.

Park it

Norman doesn’t just want audiences to see a Formula E video on social and move on—she wants them to stick around. One way of doing that is through the power of athlete-driven content or other storytelling putting the sport front and center.

It’s a strategy she saw work up close, as she served as the global director of marketing and communications for F1 from 2018 to 2022, when the Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive was reaching peak popularity during the pandemic, and later as the chief communications officer of Manchester United from 2022 to 2024, when Ted Lasso was breaking records on Apple TV, helping to popularize the sport with US audiences.

Formula E could stand to see the same halo effect, with a docuseries of its own—Formula E: Driver—which landed on Amazon Prime Video this summer, and is coming back for a second season, Norman said.

Plenty of league CMOs would love to replicate the success of Drive to Survive, but Norman acknowledged that “there’s no single silver bullet” to supercharging fandom. Instead, she and her team are employing a number of other tactics, including striking up creator partnerships, marketing the docuseries, releasing quick-turnaround highlights on social, and embracing a free-to-air broadcast strategy to try to raise the profile of Formula E. The TV audience for the sport grew by 14% to 561 million this season, with an average of 33 million cumulative viewers per race, according to Formula E.

“She is, I would say, exhaustive with her ability to receive new information and strategy, and [she’s] always looking at what’s next,” Alex Aidan, Formula E’s VP of marketing, told us. “We’ve completely flipped our marketing mix over here. We used to create brand content…and then buy our way into your feed, and we’re relying so much more now on talent and creators and people to be authentic voices for us, and it’s felt a little bit like we’ve caught up to the rest of the world.”

Even as her peers consider her to be exhaustive, Norman still carves out time to hit the track. In 2020, Norman upgraded her car, swapping her first Porsche for a Porsche 997 second-generation GT3 RS, which is “pretty much like a stripped-out track car,” loud engine and all. Norman also has a BMW M2 Competition that she uses for track days, during which racing venues like Silverstone Circuit open their tracks for racing enthusiasts.

Her driving experience gives Norman a bit of a peek into the heads of professional racecar drivers, and she’s also happy to suggest those Formula E drivers new fans should look into—like Dan Ticktum, who, she said, has got great hair, a great sense of humor, and no filter. Ticktum is just one driver of many whose personality and story Norman is prepared to share to help increase fan investment in the sport.

“As I think about the opportunity in Formula E, one of the biggest opportunities is to really be able to work with our drivers and to allow them to share their personalities,” she said. “For their personalities to come through is, for me, the most important thing that we can do as a team to build our fame, because they’re such an important element.”