AB InBev’s unique F1 race cemented a beer brand’s place in culture

You’re competing against countless brands spending millions of dollars to catch people’s attention. And if you’re lucky, consumers who see your brand will buy from you before inevitably switching to another beer.

In other words, you need to consistently be top-of-mind in culture to keep driving sales.

So, to achieve our objective of cultural relevance, we set out to address another pressing, hyper-relevant issue in F1, the world’s fastest-growing sport.

As the official partner of Williams Racing, we focused our brief on the overwhelming pressure that F1 drivers face to win, offering a timely reminder to the world of F1 that racing is only worth it if you enjoy it.

Using our F1 racing partnership, we reframed the way in which the world thinks about the joy of an active lifestyle, especially the joy of racing.

Target audience

F1 fans had seen the sport take a serious turn from a joyous one to a pressure-packed one. The proliferation of shows like Drive to Survive has also reinforced the notion in culture that F1 should be high-octane and cutthroat all the time. And interviews with drivers like Lewis Hamilton, Logan Sargeant, and Lando Norris showed that the pressure to win had reached a fever pitch.

Contextual planning

Knowing that this win-or-get-fired narrative had become so pervasive in TV shows about F1, we decided to lean into TV as a medium for our strategic approach.

Michelob Ultra and Williams Racing created a race between Logan Sargeant, a young Williams driver, and the retired F1 drivers who inspired Logan’s love of driving in the first place: Mario Andretti, Jacques Villeneuve, Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell, Jenson Button, and Damon Hill.

But this wasn’t just any F1 race. We created the first-ever real-vs.-virtual F1 race, pitting real - life Logan against digitized versions of his heroes at the peaks of their careers, on live TV.

All to remind him — and everyone who loves F1 — that it’s only worth it if you enjoy it.

And we did it all through AR, AI machine learning, and telemetry, using tech to quite literally change the game of F1 racing and create the first sporting event that spanned different dimensions of reality.

Logan raced in his car on a track — like he normally would — at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix. But his digitized opponents appeared as augmented reality avatars in his racing helmet, responding to his driving motions in real-time with the help of machine learning. Viewers saw the avatars mapped onto the real-life racetrack using a Mo-Sys camera, often used in action movies.

We previewed Lap of Legends at the United States Grand Prix in October 2023, but the full program aired on AMC and BBC America in spring 2024, interspersed with stories of Logan’s journey.

This wasn’t the kind of forgettable branded content most people gloss over. This was a TV show that other brands advertised inside of.

All breaking the boundaries of sports and technology.

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