Why Airwallex takes up sports to challenge B2B marketing norms | Advertising

This is peak marketing week in Singapore. The Grand Prix race may not be till Sunday night, but marketers’ budgetary tanks have long been filled, their media distribution engines have been primed, and the rolling start is underway. With each day, the volume of ads, signage, news conferences, brand activations and the pace of satellite events, concerts and corporate parties accelerate to the same frenzied pace as the cars eventually whizzing by on race night. 

It might therefore appear that many brands get lost in the blur, including F1 sponsors, which run the gamut from automotive to FMCG to energy and tech. This might be especially true for B2B companies, which often need to work twice as hard for brand recognition. But in speaking with Jon Stona, vice-president of global marketing at Singapore-based international transaction firm Airwallex, the strategy and purpose of their McLaren Racing sponsorship comes quickly into focus. Engaging in fan-friendly sporting events like these, he points out, delivers more awareness, affinity, trust and impact with clients than trying to appeal to them on a business level.  

“Traditional B2B marketing sometimes has that bad rap of being dry and corporate and vanilla or, quite frankly, boring,” says Stona, who has been an APAC marketing strategy and operations leader for top digital brands like Google and Stripe for more than a decade. “To be fair, there’s some truth in that when you look at a lot of the work. Our job is not to do that”. 

Slapping a logo on a race car alongside other blue-chip sponsors adds valuable brand credibility, but as an emerging global fintech player, Airwallex requires quicker growth and greater cut-through, which traditional B2B marketing methods may not provide. Ultimately, the brand found its answer by being bolder and innovative with select sports partnerships and related IP, starting with its official sponsorship of the F1 McLaren Racing team in February 2024, followed by a global multi-year partnership with Arsenal football club inked this past July.  

In Airwallex’s latest brand film, released this week with McLaren team driver Lando Norris, the work manages to hit on multiple levels at once, combining Norris’ personal passion for golf with the fintech challenger’s desire to smash traditional banking norms. Being able to debut it during the Ryder Cup in the same week leading up to the Singapore Grand Prix is a well-planned bonus, which opened up the opportunity for a more lighthearted Airwallex driver challenge video with Norris created in tandem for social media. 

The main ad features Norris taking a swing at cumbersome money transfer headaches, shattering the problems like panes of glass, one by one.  

“Oftentimes in financial services, people just don’t really appreciate the full extent of what you do or the problems that you can solve, Stona explains, “so we want [the ad] to be literal, but hopefully in an engaging way,” he tells Campaign in an exclusive interview around the ad’s release.   

While the spot might look fairly standard as celebrity ads go, there is far more marketing strategy behind it than a casual viewer might notice.  

Appetite for destruction

Much of the fintech firm’s marketing strategy can be derived from its challenger ethos. The company started up in Melbourne only a decade ago, when founders Jack Zhang and Max Li were running a coffee shop, but kept running into cross-payment issues with their global suppliers and ended up creating an alternative to traditional bank payment routes. 

Now, the brand’s focus is to let entrepreneurs and businesses know that they can do away with clunky transaction processes and arrive at a smarter, more modern alternative. 

“Sometimes you have to destroy the past to rebuild afresh in the service of progress,” Stona explains. “But how do you take something people find frustrating and make it [satisfying]? How do you elevate the destruction, make it cinematic and beautiful? That’s what we wanted to do.”  

Having spent nearly a decade at Google, Stona was well aware of the addictive allure of destruction videos online and wanted to tap into social media’s popular fascination with them.  

The result is a series of six short films called the ‘Future of Finance’ created with independent agency Special Group that show the destruction of obsolete financial institutions or processes by means of wrecking balls, metallic shredders, vice grips and the like before offering quick and easy alternatives from Airwallex. Having debuted in Australia in August, the work, with media strategy by Accenture Song, will be coming to Singapore next. 

The fit with F1 and McLaren 

In this vein, the latest Lando Norris ad is a natural extension for the challenger brand, just like the F1 McLaren partnership is a natural fit for them. Stona says what immediately drew Airwallex to F1 was the globality of the sport, not just in international popularity, but as a travelling roadshow across 24 cities that spoke to the company’s global ambitions as well. 

Also simpatico with F1 is the technological prowess involved in motorsport that matches the engineering and technology-led focus of Airwallex as a service. Bruce McLaren was, in his own right, a technologist known for revolutionising car design, pioneering aerodynamics and more efficient powertrains, who emerged from the Asia-Pacific region to take on the world.

Having current Melbourne-born driver Oscar Piastri on the McLaren team with the same shared roots as Airwallex’s founders is yet another layer of connective tissue for both brands, which like to view themselves as challengers on their respective grids.  

But aren’t sports audiences better suited to B2C brands?

For Stona, an experienced APAC marketing strategy and operations leader for top digital brands like Google and Stripe for more than a decade, landing on sports sponsorship as Airwallex’s key marketing pillar wasn’t obvious. In fact, he was a sceptic initially.  

“It wasn’t clear early on. As a marketer, I used to be fairly anti-sports partnership. I was less educated on the topic, but I used to think it would be a waste of time,” Stona admits. But the more he and his team dug into what we needed to do to build trust, awareness and growth, the more it circled back to sports. 

“People think B2B needs to be more targeted. But one of the core marketing principles we have here is that we are not marketing to business decision makers but to humans who happen to make business decisions,” Stona says.  

“If I want to get your attention—sure, I can bombard you endlessly on LinkedIn to download my 30-page white paper on financial infrastructure. But is that really where you are as a person? Probably not. I want to connect with you on the things you care about—sports, art, culture—that’s the ethos we take.” 

Airwallex considered funneling much of its marketing budget into attention-grabbing integrated campaigns with billboards and multi-channel advertising, but Stona and his team question whether such campaigns alone can provide the depth and duration of more longstanding partnerships. 

Sports deals, argues Stona, open up multifaceted possibilities. “You have corporate hospitality, you have content, you have social. You have the IP that people already have affinity with, that you can use as a creative multiplier for the rest of your work. That’s massively useful,” Stona says. “There’s just so much more that you can do because it’s this dynamic, evolving, almost organism that a traditional campaign is not.”  

A good example of this is the Shifted Perspectives activation that Airwallex initiated at the Singapore Grand Prix last year.  The activation saw McLaren F1 team driver Lando Norris appear at Singapore’s 39+ Art Space for an exhibition of his 3D self-portrait sculpture by perceptual shift artist, Michael Murphy. By being a bit more inventive with its content, instead of an autograph session or a race car livery unveiling, Airwallex was able to combine business, art and sport together into fresh content with a surprising twist that even incorporated Airwallex’s logo to reinforce brand association. 

Another meaningful benefit to having special relationships with sports teams is the ability to actually work together in true partnership.  So Airwallex actually handles financial transactions for McLaren Racing and is Arsenal’s finance software partner.  

When entrepreneurs know we work with these world-class partners, Stona says, it goes a long way to building trust and knowing we can do the same for them. In their latest brand affinity survey in Singapore, 74% of those surveyed said the McLaren partnership would make them trust Airwallex more and 73% said it would make them more likely to choose Airwallex for their organisation’s payment needs, following similar strong global survey numbers.  

Semi-annual brand surveys along with sales pipeline measurements are the primary ways Stona and his team manage the efficacy of their sports sponsorships. The positive results, along with other strategic considerations, have led Airwallex to grow sports partnerships. 

The Arsenal deal signed in July has neatly dovetailed with their European expansion while recognising the club’s international fanbase and football’s global appeal heading into a World Cup year. The first creative work with Arsenal is likely to land next month, celebrating joint convictions related to challenger spirit. 

And while global appeal is a central ingredient to such deals so far, Stona has hinted at more local plays like AFL in Australia or hockey in Canada.  

If there’s a path to greater trust and connection through sport, it’s game on for Airwallex. But first comes Singapore’s big race this weekend, where the payment provider is betting on a strong marketing payoff.