How Shell V-Power put every global Ferrari fan into the pit garage

Shell and the Scuderia Ferrari HP racing team have just celebrated their 75th anniversary of a true innovation partnership. They have worked hand-in-hand to develop technologically advanced race fuel for Ferrari’s drivers to put to the ultimate test, and together they have shared 10 Constructor’s Championships and 12 Driver’s titles.

For Shell’s most premium and iconic fuels brand, they generated hundreds of thousands of leads for Shell V-Power, a 4% year on year volume increase, and in December 2025 (the final month of the campaign) Shell V-Power margin grew 40% year on year. Incredible results enjoyed across Shell’s 46,000 sites and 33 million daily customers, all through a hyper-targeted personalised video campaign.

The Opportunity

Turning a brand partnership into measurable growth

For the past 75 years, Shell and Ferrari mostly promoted their partnership through yearly brand activation campaigns tied to F1. These campaigns were designed to increase awareness, elevate each other’s work, and show how they collaborate to win world championships.

While these campaigns achieved their intended targets, Shell knew this partnership could be leveraged for so much more. They wanted to go beyond brand sponsorships and connect with their fans and customers on a 1-to-1 level. With new tools like AI, they hoped to create a unique, memorable, and truly personal user experience that would transform how our global audience felt about their brand.

In addition, Shells knew that the right campaign could deliver measurable business impact for both Shell and Ferrari, including:

• Increasing signups for Shell Go+
• Promoting Scuderia Ferrari’s new fan app
• Growing demand and revenue for Shell V-Power

Shell’s vision for this campaign was simple, yet powerful. They wanted to bring their audience into the Formula 1 pit garage, a space that is normally only experienced by a very small group of drivers, engineers, and VIP guests. By doing this, they wanted to make each and every member of their global audience feel like a VIP, and open this highly exclusive world to them.

It was an ambitious idea, and Shell knew they needed to assemble the right team to make it happen at the next F1 event, which was only 12 weeks away.

The Team

Picking the right partners for a never-been-done-before project

Shell brought together a wide range of partners to develop this vision. They pulled in multiple parties across Shell and Ferrari, technical experts from IBM, and two external marketing and creative agencies, MSQ and Seen.

• IBM provided technical support and development for the campaign’s online home.
  
• MSQ/The Gate London acted as Shell’s creative agency and partner for this campaign, and many previous Ferrari Scuderia F1 activations.
  
• Seen provided a technology platform to develop AI-powered personalised video at global speed and scale. 

With everyone in the room together, Shell and their partners collaborated to flesh out the vision and to figure out how to make it happen.

The team settled on creating a first-person film set inside the Scuderia Ferrari HP pit garage. The viewer would be greeted by name and given a VIP pass and headphones with their name printed on it, before being met by racing stars Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton. Then, the viewer would be guided through their own VIP-style experience normally inaccessible to the public.

To capture both Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, the core content needed to be filmed in Budapest, ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix on August 3^rd 2025. The date was coming up fast. The team got to work.

The Production

Shooting, personalizing, and delivering hundreds of thousands of unique videos   

Before the Hungarian Grand Prix, Shell and their teams worked closely with MSQ and Seen to ensure production would be smooth and thorough.

“During pre-production we worked closely with the team that would shoot the footage of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc on-site in Budapest,” explained Ronald, CEO at Seen. “We needed to get it right the first time and record everything needed to personalize each video, as there would be no second chances to capture these drivers during the busy F1 season.”

Under MSQ’ direction the shoot went off without a hitch. They captured, edited, and finalized the footage, then handed it over to Seen.

Seen’s platform transformed what would have been a single hero film into a fully dynamic personalised production system that fed into a complete lead capture infrastructure. Here’s how they did it. 

• Visitor request and lead capture. IBM created a landing page that captured requests for a personalised video. A visitor arrived at the page, and provided their name and contact details. The page captured the user’s marketing consent, then fed the visitor’s data to Shell and Ferrari for lead gen, and to Seen for personalised video production.
  
• Personalised video production. Seen’s platform cloned the actor’s voice so each visitor’s name was spoken out-loud as part of their video, and added their name to key visual elements of their video. Seen’s platform was cloud-based and horizontally scalable, and easily handled surges in demand without slowing the experience for any single viewer.
  
• On-demand delivery. Seen’s platform automatically generated each personalised video on-demand and delivered it to the visitor in seconds. As soon as a visitor provided their details, they received a link to their unique video that they could watch and share with others as many times as they wished.

The entire campaign was built to generate cinema-quality personalised videos at speed and scale that were designed to be shared, all while collecting visitor data and marketing consent for Shell and Scuderia Ferrari.

And this campaign delivered.

The Results

672,000+ new marketing leads and a 4% revenue lift

The results came quick.

Requests grew steadily at first, then were spiked by Ferrari Scuderia and Shell’s social media posts. An instagram post from Charles Leclerc created an even greater spike in requests, and shifted the campaign into high gear. 

Influencers and fans began to post their own videos across social media platforms and messaging apps, and extended reach well beyond the campaign’s paid media and brand-owned channels. Some of these were huge hits. One F1 fan and influencer created and shared their personalised video and generated 1.6 million impressions on their own. 

The momentum grew, and after three months the campaign produced:

• 672,814 new marketing leads and personalised videos
  
• 2.2 million video player visits and promotions of vip.shell.com
  
• 106,796,084 total views across Shell Motorsport social media posts.
  
• 50x higher total reach than non-campaign posts during that period
  
• +4% increase in Shell V-Power B2C volume during the campaign
  
• Multiple awards for marketing innovation including Gold for Innovation & Martech Excellence, and Bronze for Best Creative (AI-Led Campaign) at the Indie’s awards

“Take some amazing brand partners, incredible creative thinking, add a dash of AI powered personalisation and you have the making of something simply outstanding” said Shell’s Global Head of Communications, Carl Pring. “We wanted to uniquely engage fans in a way that powerfully and emotionally connected with them, while having a clear role for our brand and product. The customer reactions and positive sentiment were incredible, heart warming, and far beyond what we could have hoped for. I can’t wait for the next chapter…”

This campaign was made possible through an amazing collaboration between teams at Shell, Ferrari, IBM, MSQ, and Seen. MSQ led creative development and production, IBM built the landing page and lead capture infrastructure. Shell and Ferrari were closely involved throughout, from concept through execution. Seen powered the personalised film generation.

To find out if Seen can work for your next project, reach out. Seen's personalised video platform powers campaigns of all shapes and sizes, from large-scale cinematic productions like this one, to easily produced campaigns using our library of re-brandable templates & blocks.