Williams F1: Accenture Digital Marketing Solution

The Williams F1 racing team recognized that its Web presence played an increasingly important role in attracting and sustaining the interest of its stakeholders: fans, corporate partners and the media. With only seven weeks to go before the 2006 racing season started, the team turned to Accenture to create a branded website that would help it achieve marketing excellence as it worked toward the attainment of high performance.

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Williams F1 is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of Formula One racing cars. At the end of the 2005 racing season, Williams F1 ended its association with a primary sponsor, which had also held responsibility for maintaining the team’s website. For help in developing a new website for the 2006 season—one that would promote the Williams F1 brand and bolster constituent support—Williams F1 turned to Accenture. In addition to having a 10-year relationship with the F1 team and a proven record of helping automotive clients achieve high performance, Accenture offered a cutting-edge managed service solution for building, running and hosting robust and scalable websites.

Accenture’s digital marketing team began working from the Williams F1 headquarters in the United Kingdom, as well as the Accenture facilities in Ireland, the United States and India, to create an entirely new Web presence for Williams F1. As a first step, the Accenture-led team worked with Williams F1 to analyze and develop functional and technical requirements. It was agreed that the new site would communicate with different stakeholder groups by creating three website sections based on individual templates—one each for fans, corporate partners and the media. The site also needed to accommodate heavy traffic volumes during racing weekends and enable easy and fast content updates by the Williams F1 team.

Once the requirements were defined, the team coded the website, which was built on the Microsoft .NET platform using several key Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Commerce Server 2002, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft Content Management Server 2002. Accenture provided website design, development and infrastructure hosting (through its hosting partner, AT&T), while Avanade, a joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture, focused on system development, unit testing and application support. Throughout the project, the team adhered to Accenture’s digital marketing solution methodology, which helped ensure the website would be running quickly.

In less than seven weeks, the Accenture-led team delivered the Williams F1 website. In addition to a new site that averaged 86,000 visits a month during the racing season, Williams F1 had a scalable, reliable website that enabled easy and near real-time content updates during the 2006 racing season. Accenture’s ongoing research reveals that high-performance businesses win consumer loyalty by delivering a branded consumer experience. With Accenture’s help, Williams F1 demonstrated that such a branded experience is equally important to building fan, sponsor and media support. According to Scott Garrett, Head of Marketing, Williams F1, “Our image is one of a thoroughbred race team, and using the website to support this perception, we are able to better position ourselves among our competitors in a commercial sense. This appeals to fans and sponsors alike, and as such, it is very important for our bottom-line results.”