Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix- a missed opportunity #LightUpTheNight

It’s that time of the year again in Singapore. F1 week. The Grand Prix circus comes to town. People either love it (the expats here) or hate it (the heartlanders). Why? 

Well it’s a city night race which means for 6 months before and after the circuit/stands are being built/taken down and obviously during race week traffic is gridlocked in the CBD. It also costs $150m to put on each year but attracts 300,000 paying ticket holders each year and brings in excellent tourism revenue not to mention how it presents the city state as cool and sophisticated to billions of viewers/readers across the globe.

I personally go for the concerts. It’s actually cheaper to buy a walk around ticket for the three days/nights which gets you into all the concerts than it is to buy a single concert ticket for one artist in Singapore at any other time of the year. This year’s lineup is top notch with Bastille on Friday (plus Kylie), Queen’s first visit to the island on the Saturday and headlining on Sunday after the race itself, Imagine Dragons.

The strangest part of the Singapore Grand Prix is how the local sponsor, Singapore Airlines, exploits the association, or not as the case maybe. It’s a running (inside) joke that all the government owned (through Temasek Holdings/GIC - the Singapore sovereign wealth funds) companies have to take turns to sponsor the race to pay for it and justify to the local tax payers that it’s not just their money paying for it. This was crystalised when in the first year, 2008, Emirates were going to sponsor it. How embarassing would that have been. The Emirates Singapore Grand Prix! 

So SingTel (one of three local/international telcos party owned by Temasek) had to come in and sponsor it. As they are only SingTel in Singapore (but are a regional power player with the leading telcos in each country, Globe in the Philippines, Telkomsel in Indonesia, Optus in Australia, Bharti in India etc) this didn’t make a lot of sense as the Grand Prix is global. It is therefore known as a bit of a bad case study for a sponsorship plus they couldn’t really and didn’t really exploit it due to them having little inventory. The F1 teams and global race sponsors get everything. The local sponsors get very little.

So when SingTel ended the sponsorship it was Singapore Airlines turn (also partly owned by Temasek). They appear to be making even less effort in exploiting the sponsorship. I travel in Singapore Airlines virtually every week around Asia Pacific. I am writing this from my seat on a Singapore Airlines plane back from Shanghai.

The first thing I noticed was a complete lack of anything to do with the F1 at any of my touch points. Website, email booking, text reminder, on board, (same coming over for example nothing that even mentions the F1 in the lounge in Singapore when I came over), my seat, stewardesses, the in flight entertainment, no adverts for it before films or TV, nothing when you turn it on ...nothing. 

The website does have an F1 race image/media page, one of 5 tabs, blink and you’d miss it. Plus it doesn't actually say Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix as you can see......below

I looked at each of the three in flight magazines. None have it on their front page. 2 of them don’t even have any adverts about it. Only one has two adverts but not editorial. Blink and you’d miss them.

You have a captive audience who has bought into your brand and you’re not exploiting the largest and most global sponsorship that you do to any of them. Bizarre.

I checked out their social media thinking that they must have active content in the build up to the race. I would be wrong.

Although both facebook and Twitter have the F1 Singapore Airlines images as their main cover photo their are no recent updates about the race. Last post on facebook about the race was a week ago, last post on Twitter was August 31.

The attempted use of the branding #LightUpTheNight has failed based on the fact no one appears to care/know that this is what they’re doing and their is a short animated film out with the same name which people do appear to know/care about...not a single Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix mention using that hashtag that I could find in the last few weeks. 

LIGHT UP THE NIGHT is an analog science-fiction short film set in an Orwellian, futuristic 1980s. The story tells the tensions flaring between rebellious citizens and robotic law enforcement. We are introduced to two dissidents as they take aim at the city's looming, panoptic control tower, while local band The Protomen take the stage amidst the action, inciting unrest as they narrate the struggle...... is it me or could this describe Singapore if you were being ultra critical....? Did someone know this when they picked the hashtag #LightUpTheNight ?

The Singapore Grand Prix website promotes various social media including bizarrely Pinterest which no one in Asia uses and not LinkedIn where the main male and business and therefore potential F1 customers would be.....

Then I saw the one thing that had some kind of link with the Singapore Airlines sponsored Singapore Grand Prix. A bottle of water that they gave me after the meal with a Grand Prix flag on….nothing else just a flag. You have to know that this is a Grand Prix flag and know that Singapore is sponsoring it to get the reason this is there. It doesn’t even say Singapore Grand Prix Sponsors on it.

To me this goes to the heart of the lack of commitment and follow through on the sponsorship. If they were really paying the money it costs rather than just doing it for show there would be exploiting this for all it is worth. Surely the very people they should be targeting are the business class (mostly male) travellers, yet nothing, nada, not a thing on board. It’s a week to go and you would not even know they were sponsorsing it. They may as well have not bothered as far as any passenger on board knows.

I know that Singapore are doing lots of local initiatives but that is just window dressing to appease the locals who have never really taken F1 to their hearts and see it as waste of money.

Internationally and through all the customer touch points it’s a virtually invisible sponsorship. A massive missed opportunity in my view.