Oracle Red Bull Racing energizes fans, increasing loyalty program membership more than 950%

TL; DR: Get the story behind Oracle Red Bull Racing’s successful loyalty program, The Paddock. Learn:

• What obstacles the team overcame with the help of Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement, Responsys Campaign Management, and Unity CDP
• The results
• Why Oracle Red Bull Racing chose Oracle

Formula 1 is the fastest-growing major sports league in terms of online followers. The expansion in online options to watch the racing, as well as to follow your favorite teams, has had a huge impact on the sport and changed the ways in which fans expect to participate in the sport they love.

Oracle Red Bull Racing is a world championship team known for innovating not only on the track, but also in how they create the best fan engagements in the sport. Whether it’s driving a race car through city streets for people to see or using data to personalize digital engagements for each fan, Oracle Red Bull Racing focuses on an unrivaled experience that sets the bar for what fans should expect from the sports and entertainment organizations they follow.

Throughout the year, Oracle Red Bull Racing competes on and off the track. Winning with the best fan experience meant the team needed to offer new ways to connect—with the team, the drivers, and the sport overall—both during race weekends and in the moments in between.

This drive to innovate and win led the team to launch its world-class loyalty program, The Paddock, a free online platform that gives fans personalized interactions with the team. Fans can:

• Read the latest stories about the team
• View premium content, ask questions of team members
• Earn loyalty points
• Get rewards, such as exclusive access to merchandise and experiences

Launched in the latter half of the 2021 race season, The Oracle Red Bull Racing Paddock saw an explosion in fan participation, with loyalty membership sign-ups increasing 950%. Beyond just signing up, fans were highly active participants, submitting thousands of questions to the team and redeeming more than 35,000 digital rewards before the end of the 2021 F1 season.

Find out how to create marketing that keeps customers coming back.

Building a fan experience platform: Goals and challenges

The Oracle Red Bull Racing team has three broad goals for The Paddock platform:

• Drive innovation: The team wanted to shake things up in F1 and set an example across sports and entertainment. They were looking for new approaches and solutions to engage and reward fans.
• Deliver exceptional experiences for their fans: The Paddock was built to provide a clear and compelling value exchange for fans who connected and engaged with the team, opening new ways for the team to understand its fan base and give them personalized experiences.
• Expand the fan base: An F1 team can’t survive without its fans. So, the Oracle Red Bull Racing team has a clear goal to retain and grow the fan base by creating highly personalized experiences that boost engagement and get fans closer to the F1 experience.

Achieving these goals required overcoming several obstacles, including

• Understanding the fan value proposition: There was no clear “one-size-fits-all” model for what fans might want from Oracle Red Bull Racing and what a platform for these connections could look like. Innovating in the area of fan engagement meant inventing new approaches and trying out new ways to meet and exceed fans’ expectations, with continual development and assessment to ensure they are delivering what fans want, when they want it.
• Using technology to enable fan engagement: The team had limited technology in place that could connect and integrate across fan touchpoints, both offline and online. Each channel operated in a siloed manner rather than promoting engagement across an ecosystem.
• Knowing the fans themselves: The team hadn’t previously explored what individual fans were looking for from the team. Without this approach being in place, the ability to create personalized, unique experiences for fans was limited.

How the team used Oracle Cloud

Using Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement, the team launched The Paddock, the first loyalty program in Formula 1. The Paddock was built from the ground up to thank fans for their support and give them new ways to engage with the team. In sports, the most devoted and passionate fan isn’t necessarily the biggest spender, so teams can’t rely on ticket or merchandise sales alone to measure loyalty.

 In fact, most F1 fans will never get to experience a race in person. Finding measurable ways to recognize loyal fans can also provide data and insights that can help the team build better experiences. Oracle Cloud Applications helped the team build this critical capability.

Regardless of past purchase history or race attendance, anyone can sign up for The Paddock for free. Fans of Oracle Red Bull Racing can earn points by engaging with exclusive team content such as behind-the-scenes stories, video interviews and podcasts, keeping up to date on social media, referring friends, and taking quizzes about recent races. All this activity is tracked and tied to the individual’s fan profile on The Paddock so it can be used to customize the types of content and rewards a fan can receive.

The Paddock itself lives within the wider Red Bull Racing Fan Experience Platform and integrates with Oracle Advertising and CX technology as well as Red Bull Racing systems. These include:

• Oracle Unity CDP: Helps create a 360-degree view of fans, through data
• Oracle Responsys: Tailors email and web-push fan communications
• Red Bull custom content management solution: Shows front-end displays of The Paddock within redbullracing.com using out-of-the-box CrowdTwist widgets
• On-premises middleware: Integrates with on-premises tools
• Third-party registration tools: Verifies logins and profiles master records
• OneTrust: Provides cookie consent options and GDPR compliance

Learn more about CrowdTwist, Responsys, Unity CDP, and the other capabilities of Oracle B2C Marketing.

Results

In just the first week after launch in 2021, Oracle Red Bull Racing saw strong engagement with the platform, with an increase in fan loyalty accounts.

In the first month, the team saw:

• A 620% increase in full members of The Oracle Red Bull Racing Paddock
• 16 million loyalty points delivered

From the initial launch through the end of the season, results included

• A 950% increase in members from launch day to the end of the season
• Members of the Paddock from 189 countries
• 18,703 loyalty codes hidden in social media treasure hunts that were found by fans
• More than 5,500 questions asked by fans, with selected questions answered on a team podcast

The team delivered tens of thousands of rewards from the initial launch through the end of the season, resulting in:

• 6.4 million loyalty points redeemed by fans, delivering more than 34,700 rewards
• The first batch of cards signed by driver Sergio Pérez—aka “Checo cards,” based on his nickname—were sold out within 30 minutes of going live
• Fans twice set records for traffic to the Oracle Red Bull Racing website, driven in part by connections from The Paddock

Why Red Bull Racing worked with Oracle

Oracle helped Red Bull Racing bring its vision of a winning fan engagement proposition to life. Demonstrating a true partnership, Oracle experts integrated with the Red Bull Racing team to tap into the Oracle team’s product expertise to build The Paddock loyalty program.

The two teams continue to work closely together to turn data into intelligence and intelligence into relevant and personalized experiences for fans at the moments that matter to them. Oracle CrowdTwist has enabled Red Bull Racing to capture relevant data and, utilizing Oracle Unity, build a 360-degree fan profile that can be used to personalize interactions and offerings, engaging beyond transactions and superficial segmentation to really understand fan behavior, motivations, and preferences.

Find more about Oracle Red Bull Racing, the Paddock, and customer loyalty with:

• Oracle Red Bull Racing’s home on the web
• Marketing that keeps customers coming back
• Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement