Ferrari/Marlboro: a new $500 million contract
The new sponsorship agreement signed between Scuderia Ferrari and Philip Morris is expected to bring at least 500 million dollars to the Italian team over three years.
Ferrari, officially registered in the Formula 1 World Championship under the name “Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro,” announced in a statement this week that its contract with the company Philip Morris International had been extended until the end of 2015. This sponsorship deal will bring at least $500 million to the Scuderia. Let us recall that the previous agreement between the two companies was supposed to expire at the end of next year, that is, the end of 2012.
For several years, anti-tobacco laws in effect in Europe and much of the world have prevented Ferrari from using the white and red Marlboro brand logo on its racing cars and within the team, and this has been the case since 2008.
This ban was actually the source of some controversies against the Scuderia. Some observers accused it of implicitly and thus illicitly promoting the cigarettes of the famous company through the “barcode” logos on the red cars. This controversy forced Ferrari to remove all these logos in 2010.
Despite everything, according to the magazine SportsPro, Philip Morris will be spending $160 million per year on sponsorship. This figure remains more or less similar to what was written in the previous contract. It should also be noted that this extension comes in the same year as the introduction of a new Ferrari team logo, which vaguely resembles the original Marlboro logo. If this figure seems significant given the limited visibility the brand has on the bodywork of the Maranello cars, it’s because Philip Morris buys all the available advertising space and recoups its investment through the team’s other sponsors. It seems that only Shell pays Ferrari directly to appear on the sidepods of Alonso and Massa’s cars.
The history of Marlboro in F1 began in 1972. From 1974 to 1986, the tobacco manufacturer partnered with the McLaren team in a famous collaboration. The brand also became a partner of Scuderia Ferrari during this period, before becoming its title sponsor in 1997, until at least 2015 now.
