Title	MODELLING COLLECTIVE EXCITEMENT: CAPTURING MINUTE-BY-MINUTE F1 FAN ENGAGEMENT DU
Brand	FORMULA 1
Product/Service	FORMULA 1 RACING
Category	A01. Data & Analytics & Insight
Entrant	FLAMINGO London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	FLAMINGO London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Milly Liechti	Flamingo	Marketing and Communications Manager
Bronwen Morgan	Flamingo	Head of Content
Lucas Galan	Flamingo	Head of Applied Data Science

Summary

Modelling collective excitement: Capturing Minute-by-minute F1 fan engagement during live events F1 is one of the world's most successful sports entertainment brands, boasting 503 million fans globally, but if you ask them what they find most exciting about the races, you'd be hard pressed to get a meaningful answer beyond crashes and overtakes. This makes it a particularly tricky audience to grow. As we know from our previous work in pinpointing the appeal of F1, it’s a task that involves modernising the sport and attracting younger audiences, while maintaining its heritage and staying true to its core essence. In order to do that successfully, you need to understand your fans completely. Understanding audience engagement is becoming more and more complex. The sheer amount of data available (and the number of places to look for it) has led to a new type of problem: extracting clean, representative and honest reactions to media is challenging from a both technical (speed, scope, analysis) and empirical (size, accuracy, actionability) perspective. In 2017, F1 approached us to help it understand how to grow in the right way. In order to do that, we first had to understand the true nature of its appeal. As part of this work, we explored and documented F1's various online communities.It was during this analysis that we noticed something interesting. We saw that, predictably, fan conversation across multiple forums concentrated on days when races took place. What we didn't expect was that commenting was accurate to the second, meaning most people were reacting in real-time during the races. By combining the right forums of avid fans and accurately matching all the different time stamps, we could actually model real-time reactions to a race as it unfolded. This would allow F1 to pinpoint the most and least engaging parts of races (including elements like entertaining fan reactions) in order to dial these up and and down in future coverage. “Formula One continues to look for innovative ways of measuring our digital fan’s engagement and enjoyment of the sport. With this tool we can analyse different aspects of a specific race, helping indicate what factors make a specific F1 Grand Prix the most exciting racing spectacle in Motorsport.” Sean Bratches, Managing Director, Commercial Operations, F1 We created this approach to meet a specific need within F1: to understand the appeal of races in order improve fan experience in the future. But this technique has clear applications beyond F1. It’s ability to pinpoint response and engagement to specific moments would provide huge insight not just on the appeal of other sporting events, but could also be used to measure engagement around any other live events, as well as film and television.