Could Virtual Placement Make Motorsport Advertising More Sustainable?

Decarbonizing transportation is not a problem with a one-shot solution. A lot of the heavy lifting in personal transport may be performed by huge shifts such as the switch from fossil fuels to electric, but even then, the whole chain needs to be involved for a truly green solution. For motorsport, the situation is even more complicated. Vehicle emissions are a small fraction of the carbon footprint in racing. Most emissions come from elsewhere, and one component in that is the advertising at events.

Formula 1, for example, which I have previously argued needs to seriously rethink its decarbonization credentials, emitted 256,551 tons of CO2e in 2019, but just 0.7% of that was from the F1 cars themselves. The rest comes from activities including event operations, logistics, the team factories, and business travel for team employees and partners. The advertising at each event will be part of that footprint. Ad agencies are beginning to take sustainability seriously, with Purpose Disruptors for example aiming to put climate change on the agenda, and AdGreen even creating a calculator to help agencies do better. But these are focused primarily on optimizing the production phase.

A lot of waste can be involved in traditional physical advertising at an event location, which will be up for the period of the campaign and then be thrown away. For motorsport where every race is in a different location, the situation is even worse. Advertisements are there for the race weekend only. It may be possible to move them to each new event, but either way there is a carbon footprint involved. It may not be possible to use existing assets for a street circuit, where this must be tailored to the specific buildings in that city.

A potential answer comes from greater use of virtual advertising. This is where adverts are inserted into the broadcasting feed digitally so that they appear as if they are really in the location. But in fact, they aren’t. Obviously, this doesn’t work for people who are physically attending a sports event. But with the fan base for motorsport frequently being remote viewers rather than attendees, this is less of an issue than for some sports where a large portion of their income comes from fans visiting a sports ground.

Virtual advertising has been in use for a few years now in field-based sports, such as football (soccer to American readers). A thread on Reddit highlighted how advertising within the match feed of European matches could be changed for different regions. This technology from Supponor places ads on the perimeter hoarding at a match using LED screens. The hoarding emits non-visible light signals that allow the system to overlay different adverts onto the same panel dynamically, allowing Coke to be advertised in one country and Pepsi in another, for example.

Obviously, this technology is limited to perimeter hoarding, but there are alternatives that can place advertising messages within the field itself. Broadcast Virtual’s Virtual Paint can insert advertising graphics directly onto the playing surface, for example in the touchline area. Alternatively, virtual billboards can be erected on the playing field containing messages. AI algorithms can detect pitch features, camera moves, and players, so that the latter can remain visible, and the virtual ad will disappear behind them as they pass.

However, these types of virtual placement work best with fixed, predictable areas such as the perimeter hoarding or grid of a playing field, with static camera locations as well. This won’t work so easily with motorsport, which tends to move form circuit to circuit and involve a far greater variety of cameras in many different locations, including aerial views and even on the helmets of the drivers. This is a much more complex problem for adding advertising messages.

But it’s not impossible, and brand integration company Ryff has a potential answer. Its technology uses GPU-accelerated AI to analyze aspects like perspective, lighting, reflections, and shadows in a video sequence so that advertising messages and products can be seamlessly integrated. If you know about how 3D rendering works, Ryff’s technology does raytracing only in reverse. Because it inserts messages in real time, the system can deliver any number of different campaigns for different regions, which is essential for motorsports with global viewers all around the world. It can also change the message afterwards, so a historic race can have the latest campaign. The message is locked into the scene, so moves with it even if the camera pans or zooms.

The great thing about technology like this is that there is no need to erect a giant billboard on the side of a building for a few days, for example, then take it down later and throw it in the bin. That’s a massive waste of resources. Doing the same thing with a large physical LED display would consume power and again the screen would have to be erected and then taken down to be moved elsewhere. For races in historic locations, this could even have consequences for the conservation of protected buildings.

Virtual advertising has the potential to provide motorsport a wide range of options for placing messages seamlessly within live race broadcasts without the usual carbon footprint involved. For racing series like Extreme E, which are particularly concerned about the impact they have on the environments they use for their events, this will be essential. But, increasingly, even traditional motorsports like F1 are going to have to consider how they can decarbonize, and virtual advertising provides a possible solution.