Relo Metrics Gets up to Speed with F1 Sponsorship
As sports move online and sponsorship investment follows tracking on-screen brand exposure need to keep pace, not easy when logos are travelling at 200 Mph. Relo Metrics is using a new AI-powered tool to do just this for millions of sponsorship placements in real-time with expansion into other motorsports and then European football leagues to follow.
“F1 is our first truly global sport,” says CEO Jay Prasad. “Every race weekend it gets 100 million viewers around the world. We’ve plans to expand into other motorsport series like Formula E, WEC, and MotoGP. European football is probably where we're heading next.”
According to the SportsPro Formula One 2024 Business Report, F1 is experiencing explosive commercial growth and attracting 100+ million weekly viewers, a global audience comparable to the annual Super Bowl. Sponsorship spend across F1 and its teams for the 2025 season is projected to reach more than $2.9 billion, an increase of ten percent year-over-year (YoY), according to a recent study by Ampere Analysis.
Enter Relo Census
Debuting at the Australian Grand Prix, Relo’s Census platform enables brands, teams, and agencies to track sponsorship performance instantly and optimize investments mid-season.
“Motorsport in general has some inherent challenges to it because it's not two teams playing one another like on a football pitch,” says Prasad. “Each [branded car] is very different from one another.”
Formula One runs 10 teams, Moto GP has 11 and NASCAR can field up to 17 teams with multiple cars interweaving with one another at high speed. This clearly creates challenges attempting to track things accurately. In addition, the circuits and grandstands are outfitted with LEDs and signage, some of which are virtual assets input into the broadcast stream.
“Because of these inherent challenges we’ve invested further in computer vision-based AI to build neural network models to train our models and basically solve this problem,” says Prasad.
Specifically, Relo has doubled memory capacity and throughput by upgrading to Nvidia’s multimodal AI model, to train on larger datasets more efficiently.
Traditional methods struggle to accurately capture fast-moving brand placements on cars traveling at over 200+ mph, often relying on manual annotation or delayed post-race analysis.
“From a quality standpoint, just because [a logo] appeared on screen doesn't necessarily mean it had value. If it's totally blurry, then it doesn't have value. Virtual assets could also be animated.”
The camera angles offered by the host broadcast are already designed to maximise the amount of time sponsor logos are on screen.
“Measurement has to keep up with this,” says Prasad. “There are also inserts of driver cameras [point of view cameras from the car cockpit] which our model also takes into account.”
Relo applies scene detection frame by frame across a feed of the host broadcast feed as the race is played out live. It runs three detection models simultaneously. One to detect the logo, another to understand logo placement (such as is it a car or a billboard), and a third sponsor recognition model that classifies each logo that gets detected and says what brand it is by probability.
“You have logo, placement, and rights holder. We have to create a taxonomy of all the placements on the car, the track, and the driver and then track what's happening across all those variables using this advanced model.”
However, at such speeds even the computer vision can still get it wrong. “We can analyze the race data live to deliver initial sponsorship scores but we will then do additional quality processing post-race to deliver a final report. We correct errors with manual checks. We do reinforcement with humans in the loop and the more mistakes we correct, the smarter [the machine] becomes.”
Parsing viewership data and tracking exposure
Relo also calculate the media value by factoring in viewership numbers (which are not just global figures but which compare how viewers in different geographic areas).
“There's a bit of a lag in getting those numbers. We can analyze some things fairly quickly and get it up to 95% accuracy level and then for final publication we apply viewing figures.”
Relo Metrics also parses the data through social media. “There’s an important window immediately after the race when things go viral. We can capture all the activity in social and digital sports and news websites.”
The idea is for brands to gain greater understanding into the value of their investment when their logo is exposed for fractions of a second a time on screen.
“Instead of just reporting total values for posts or partners, we delve into the specifics to uncover potential hidden value. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of how each element contributes to overall sponsorship effectiveness, revealing insights that might otherwise go unnoticed.”
Relo Metrics analytics software is licenced directly brands and means brands can now compare F1 sponsorship performance analysis and comparison across multiple sports leagues and media environments.
“Expanding Relo Census into F1 is about more than just tracking sponsorship exposure; it’s about bringing motorsports into a larger ecosystem of sponsorship valuation,” Prasad says.
“We built Census so that brands could benchmark views across sports,” Prasad says. “We started with the major North American sports and built computer vision models for the NFL and NBA then WNBA and MLS. Now we’re adding NWSL and more and more professional sports. That means we've created a syndicated set of placements in those sports. Multinational brands are looking for a more advanced capability and measurement so they can track and compare their investments across multiple sports. And they want F1 to be a part of the way they're analysing their sponsorships overall.”
Allied Market Research shows sports sponsorship is projected to reach $151.4 billion by 2032. “Say you’re a marketing lead at a bank and thinking about investing in a sport and you are thinking the Northeast U.S. is a good market for you, you might want to know which other brands are active in the Northeast and what share of voice do they have across what sport and what placement is driving all the value. We judge for clarity, for duration, for share of voice. Many different factors go into our quality score.”
Relo already works with two NASCAR teams and plan to adapt its model for any motorsport.
“We are confident that we'll be able to keep adapting what we've built so that we can offer this level of granularity and scale to all motorsports.”
F1 sponsorship
Teams account for 72% of total sponsorship revenue, with corporate F1 deals contributing the remainder. The average number of sponsors per team is 32. McLaren leads with 51 unique partners. The Williams’ title sponsorship deal with Australian software corporation Atlassian is the largest team asset sold for the upcoming season so far. Ampere estimates this to be worth between $25-35m annually.
French luxury goods company LVMH announced a 10-year sponsorship deal with Formula 1 starting in 2025, valued at over $100 million a year. Its brands include Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy and TAG Heuer.
Technology and financial service brands (cryptocurrency, software/SaaS, and gambling) are the largest investors of new sponsorship deals signed for the 2025 season. They include American Express entering its first full season as a F1 Global partner and IBM with Scuderia Ferrari.
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