Lionel Messi and Marsh: How an F1 Brand Partnership is Born (and Its Serendipitous Launch)

That’s because just days earlier Formula 1 had announced Marsh as the Official Risk Partner and Official Insurance Brokering Partner in a multi-year deal, and part of that arrangement included plastering Marsh-branded track signage around the Hard Rock Stadium’s circuit. And it just so happened Messi, Colapinto, and Hadjar all had cameras pointed at them with that signage clearly visible when the big moments happened.

“We first showed up in Miami and Messi is standing in front [of our sign] and it was like, ‘thank you,’” John Jones said to me excitedly as engines roared in the background during the United States Grand Prix weekend. Jones is the SVP and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Marsh, so he was the perfect person to ask why a company of Marsh’s scale would bring a global partnership like this to life—a first-of-its-kind deal for the company—and what it entails.

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The urgency of a global rebrand

Those moments occurring in the first weekend of the partnership may have been serendipitous, but the sponsorship was anything but. Jones declined to share figures, but, per SportsPro, arrangements of this magnitude—known as F1’s “Official Partner” tier—cost companies like Marsh an estimated $20-25 million per year.

And while Marsh’s business has been growing, with the company reporting $27 billion in 2025 revenue, up 10% and its 16th straight year of underlying growth, the company had just gone through significant structural change and needed the right tools to tell that story, and fast.

“We announced the [Marsh McLennan] brand change in January. We really had five brands that were out there, including the corporate brand, and we were going down to one brand,” Jones explained as he walked me through the company’s move at the start of this year to consolidate four well-known business units, and a new Business and Client Services (BCS) unit, under the new Marsh brand.

“Each of those other brands all had great brand equity, and Marsh was our best-known and oldest brand, but it was known as an insurance broker and a risk manager. So when we made the change, we wanted to make sure those other brands came in and people realized that Marsh was more than an insurance broker. So we did have a brand awareness and a brand narrative challenge that we wanted to get at.”

As Jones explained the situation, he made clear Marsh wanted a global sponsorship to tackle that challenge, and to do it quickly. It was a unique circumstance for a company that had only just unified what had been distinct businesses, each with its own legacy.

“We had never done a global sponsorship before because we had all these brands and it just didn’t make sense for us. Now when we’re a single brand, you could build that and tell your story around risk and the narrative of how we help in a world that seems more and more risky.”

That’s where Formula 1 came in.

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Choosing the right partner for a first-of-its-kind sponsorship

Now that Marsh knew it needed to tell a unified story, they needed to find the right vehicle (pun intended). But the team didn’t want to follow the traditional route.

“The insurance industry typically has gone into golf. There are all kinds of different tournaments where you have an insurance company [in the tournament’s name],” Jones said, painting a very familiar visual for me considering my father was an insurance agent who brought home a near-limitless supply of insurance-branded golf equipment.

Instead, Jones and Marsh’s President and CEO, John Doyle, considered a sport that neither was a fan of before. A sport with attractive audience data that, as Jones explained it, came recommended by people he trusted: Formula 1.

It’s not hard to see the caliber of logos adorning Formula 1’s partner page, and the partner pages (and cars) of its teams, so I pressed Jones to learn how he decided Formula 1 was the right partner for such a major milestone, and he shared his three-pronged framework:

“We wanted to build the brand by generating brand awareness and familiarity around our story with the brand change. It was B2B; is the business ecosystem big enough that we’ll have clients and prospects in it that we can earn some money back off of it? And then it was colleagues; we wanted to make sure colleagues were engaged and excited about it.”

Across the board, they found Formula 1 to be the right fit. F1’s press release announcing the partnership pegged the fanbase at 827 million fans worldwide, but what mattered more to Jones was what Marsh’s data showed within it: a concentration of the CEOs, CFOs, and HR leaders who typically buy its services, an audience Marsh could tell its brand story to and eventually convert to clients. Plus, Marsh had teams already working in the space, including Oliver Wyman’s Sports and Entertainment Practice and the Insurance Brokering and Risk Management business’ Marsh Sports and Events Practice.

Customer pipeline aside, what really stood out to Jones and Jillian Lamaker, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Marsh Risk who helped execute the partnership and also spoke with me in Austin, was the reaction from their colleagues, the more than 95,000 Marsh employees around the world.

Lamaker stressed how excited the colleagues she spoke with were about the partnership. Jones, for his part, said colleagues’ enthusiasm is what sold him on it in the first place: “we ran into a lot of colleagues that were big fans, and that is what convinced me eventually. I had an early-career colleague who started rattling off statistics and said, ‘you’ve got to do it.’”

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How do you measure the success of an F1 partnership?

While I wasn’t able to go into the weeds with Jones on how Marsh measures a partnership of this magnitude and how it’s progressing, he did share a simple view of two important dimensions:

1. Brand awareness - “We’re looking at the narratives. We use the typical kind of marketing data to see how we’re doing on the brand side. And then my favorite is the anecdotal feedback.”
2. Revenue - Marsh already works with some race promoters, so they can naturally expand those relationships while also tracking net new business from clients and prospects that come from these races.

And then there are the day-to-day moments that are harder to measure. Jones said clients “get it right away,” and when a meeting’s PowerPoint deck has a Formula 1 car in it, “it’s immediately a conversation piece.”

Inside Marsh, it’s not hard to imagine the same thing happening at a larger scale. Lamaker described colleagues who are excited about the partnership, and with so many who are already fans, spotting the company logo on a race broadcast is the kind of moment that would get them talking.

Then there are the anecdotal moments like Messi in Miami. Marsh can’t bet on moments like that, but Formula 1 is a sport that invites them, in the same way it invites the concentration of CEOs and other decision-makers Marsh is after.

Marsh didn’t choose Formula 1 because a superstar happened to stand in front of its signage. But whether it’s planning or first-race luck, you always want to be in the right place at the right time.