- Kenyon says AB InBev is now Williams’ biggest reference for new partners
- Williams also beat Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren to Anthropic deal this year
- Team selling commercial partners on journey back to top of sport
Former Manchester United and Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon has explained how Williams’ partnership with Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) helped reset the Formula One team’s approach to its commercial partnerships.
Kenyon has acted as an advisor to the Williams board since 2022, a role he personally sought out by calling the team. He has since been an influential figure in overhauling what he described as the team’s “broken” commercial operation.
Williams now boast more than 20 partners, including a title sponsorship with Atlassian and deals with the likes of Barclays and Gulf Oil.
Commercial partnerships account for more than half of the team’s revenue, which in 2024 was UK£179.78 million (US$244.41 million), a significant increase on the UK£126.97 million (US$172.42 million) generated in 2023.
“It was pretty awful [when I first joined the team],” Kenyon said at SportsPro London. “The great thing about the investor group [Dorilton Capital] was long-term [stability]. It’s not a private equity house, it’s not something that’s going to flip it in three to five years’ time, it’s a family office-based investment.
“Its objective was to get Williams back to where it was in the ’90s as a multiple world championship [winning team]. It resonates really highly with partners who are investing a lot of money over a multiple year deal that the people they’re doing a deal with are still going to be there in three to five years’ time.”
When he arrived, Kenyon revealed that Williams had 17 partners “generating no money because most of the deals were value in kind”. That changed after conversations with AB InBev in 2023.
“I kid you not, that one deal was worth more than the 17 other deals that we’d had the previous year – and it wasn’t a big deal,” said Kenyon. “But what it did was it established a real leader brand which we could leverage and build from.
“The great thing they did is not just stick a sticker on the car, they activated it and that’s what we needed – we needed somebody who was going to use Williams in campaigns, getting our brand out there and positioning us in the right way.”
The partnership saw AB InBev promote its Michelob Ultra brand for two seasons before deciding that competing for visibility with Formula One’s global partner Heineken was too difficult.
“[AB InBev] don’t play in a world where they play in second fiddle,” Kenyon added. “But what was interesting about that is they’re one of our biggest references. So if we’ve got a partner, they’ll go and talk to AB and they’ll tell you what they got out of it and how successful that relationship was for two years.”
Kenyon also revealed that Williams fended off competition from Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren to secure its partnership with Anthropic.
The deal, which was announced in February, saw the artificial intelligence (AI) company become the team’s official thinking partner, with its AI assistant Claude integrate across the organisation.
“Here we are in seventh place, so we had to be be creative and we had to dig deep,” said Kenyon. “What became obvious is what they wanted was to be inside our business and be very much part of the journey.
“We don’t sell a position. We don’t say that in ’26 we’re going to be fifth or second because you get killed. What we do is a journey back to the top, and that journey back to the top is race winning in ’28 and it’s competing for a world championship in ’30.
“What won us that deal was fundamentally our people. We had a great story, we had a great integration, we had a journey that they liked. They were a new business – going to be the biggest company in the world – so they liked the journey.
“But fundamentally what won that deal: we got their C-suite into our offices in London and we had a long conversation. Not about rights and assets and all those things, but that if we’re going to be with this business for five years plus, do these people fit our culture.
“That’s what won that deal over those that were bigger than us.”
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