Many of the publicly traded, real-life companies that sponsored the fictional race team in “F1 The Movie” experienced outsize gains in their stock prices in the days following the film’s release, according to data shared with SBJ. That is a positive early indicator for the companies that are hoping for a big ROI from the hit film. The Apple Original Films production is entering its third week with $393M grossed so far, a hefty tally that suggests ample exposure for the roughly dozen brands that received product placement in the movie, which cost a reported $200M to make. Apple and Jerry Bruckheimer films made a combined $40M in sponsor revenue from the film, SBJ first reported, with the publicly traded Expensify taking the title sponsor position.
Brian Walkup, Rollins College Crummer Graduate School of Business professor of finance, and sports marketing consultant Jonathan Jensen analyzed trading for seven publicly traded companies that have placement in the movie and found that all of their stocks increased in value. They were Expensify, Tommy Hilfiger, SharkNinja, Mercedes-Benz, EA Sports, Heineken and T-Mobile. Walkup compared their one-day trading from Friday before the opening weekend to the firms’ stock price at the close of trading the next Monday. Walkup said the seven stocks averaged a 2.46% increase, including gains of 4.29% for Tommy Hilfiger, 4.08% for SharkNinja, 3.77% for Expensify, 2.42% for Mercedes and 1.94% for T-Mobile. Taken together, that represents a leap of $7.8B in market cap. Walkup analyzed the data again a week later and found further gains averaging 3.35% for the seven companies.
DRIVING GROWTH: A second positive indicator about the potential benefits for the film for sponsors emerged last week in the form of a research note from Bank of America. Alexander Perry, an analyst for the bank, increased his price target for SharkNinja stock from $125 a share to $130, and wrote: “We believe SN’s recent sponsorship of Brad Pitt’s racing team in the new F1 Movie should help drive global brand growth at a time when SN is focused on formally marketing SN as one entity and expanding its presence in [Europe, Middle East and Africa], especially in France & Germany, which are the movie’s #3 and #5 highest grossing markets.” SharkNinja stock is up about 15% year to date. One of the major aims of the deal for SharkNinja was to promote the two brands, Shark and Ninja, together for the first time after previously marketing them separately, the company told Women’s Wear Daily. The brands were merged in 2015. Expensify, the expense management software company that says it has 15 million users, has had a much tougher slog in 2025. Its stock is down 38% year to date. While Expensify did see an initial boost in its stock price after the film came out, it is now down 5.4% over the last month overall.
REVVED-UP IMPRESSIONS: Expensify CFO Ryan Schaffer went on Fast Company’s “Brand New World” podcast and said that part of the company’s strategy with the sponsorship was “we’re going to spend ‘X’ amount, and then a bunch of other companies are going to spend many, many, many multiples of our investment to get these images out into the world, so this is a way to get a huge outsized ROI just in terms of awareness and impressions versus the alternative is, ‘OK, we’re going to spend that money on ad words or give it to some influencer or something.’ The amount of impressions, it’s a huge multiplier. Other companies much larger than ours are going to be promoting our logo, not on purpose, but they’re going to be promoting images ... by the nature of this sponsorship.” Google Trends data showed that searches for Expensify last month were at their highest level since August ‘22, while the all-time high was in February 2019 when it ran a Super Bowl ad.
