From Tobacco to Crypto: The Search for the Next Lucrative Vice Motorsport Sponsor
Vice sponsorship: How tobacco engineered the economics of modern motorsport
Tobacco use is widely recognized as a lethal habit and has for all intents and purposes disappeared from the visible marketing landscape.
You’d be hard pressed to remember the last time you saw a tobacco brand anywhere but behind a store counter, yet racing fans will know it wasn’t always this way.
As destructive as the tobacco industry was and continues to be, there is no denying just how mightily their involvement shaped motorsports. Obviously we can talk about liveries which have since become iconic, and it’s shocking just how many names from a certain era are actually tobacco-related.
Marlboro, Gitanes, John Player Special, Silk Cut.
All tobacco brands, and that’s only a handful of examples!
Why did tobacco companies invest so heavily in motorsports?
They did so because the return on investment they received allowed them to quite literally engineer several eras of motorsports.
Tobacco companies also defined the modern era of racing sponsorship, and they did so for reasons that still form the bedrock of why any brand enters the sport today.
In marketing, the ground rule is to appeal to your target demographic, and decades ago there was a nearly perfect overlap between motorsports and how tobacco companies wanted their brands perceived.
Cultural alignment: Speed, danger, masculinity
Tobacco brands, particularly in the post-war era, weren’t just selling cigarettes, they were aiming for cultural relevance and motorsport offered the perfect playground for this effort.
Fast cars, brave men, global glamour, national prestige, motorsport wasn’t advertising, it was myth-making. Marlboro, for instance, wasn’t just promoting a product; it was selling identity, and the “Marlboro Man” as imagined by the brand probably did race cars.
That made F1 the perfect showcase for tobacco products.
Global reach…without regulation
As far back as the 1970s and 1980s, traditional media channels in key Western markets were increasingly closed, and closing, off to tobacco advertising.
Regulatory pressure tightened, bans proliferated, but motorsport remained an open frontier via an intrinsic loophole. No ad-breaks were needed because the race itself was the ad, and racing series placed no limitations on liveries. And with global travel, international broadcasts, and fanbases that spanned continents, motorsports became one of the last legal avenues for tobacco giants to pump their brands into the public consciousness at scale.
Unparalleled branding real estate
Motorsport offered something no other sport could: total brand immersion. Full-car liveries turned race cars into mobile billboards. Driver suits, helmets, and even team names became brand assets: Marlboro McLaren, Mild Seven Benetton, just to name a few.
On-screen time during the race coincided with the very moment the product was metaphorically "in use." The branding wasn’t supplemental, it was embedded and to this day, race fans will easily identify the John Player Special Lotus F1 car.
Demographic match: Young, male, and loyal
The motorsport fanbase at the time was a marketer’s dream for tobacco: young, male, impressionable, and statistically more likely to smoke.
Furthermore these were not passive viewers, as they do today racing fans followed the sport with religious devotion, as much as they could with the media available at the time.
They bought the merchandise, idolized the drivers, and connected the brand with the thrill of the win. For tobacco companies laser-focused on cultivating brand loyalty, this was addiction by another name.
Tobacco companies could outspend everyone
Tobacco companies had significant profit margins, which gave them the power to outbid nearly every other industry. They locked in title sponsorships, funded full works teams, and even influenced regulatory decisions.
Here’s an extract from The NASCAR Way: The Business That Drives the Sport:
“The following year, in 1972, R.J. Reyolds proposed a deal: it would sponsor NASCAR’s top racing series if NASCAR would reduce the number of races from forty-six to thirty-one. Reynolds believed that a shorter tour, profiling bigger events, would create more meaningful exposure and a more cost-efficient use of its promotion dollars. NASCAR agreed to the proposal, and thereafter its premier race series was known as the Winston Cup.”
This wasn’t sponsorship, it was acquisition. Companies didn’t so much buy space in motorsport as own its aesthetic for decades.
No other sector could compete.
Teams had to get creative to get around tobacco sponsorship bans, and interestingly this created liveries which ended up becoming iconic in their own right (Image source: www.roadandtrack.com)
How tobacco sponsorship still influence the sponsorship and motorsport landscapes
The tobacco era left three long-lasting impacts that still define motorsports sponsorship:
First, it set a precedent for big budgets. Tobacco normalized eight-figure annual deals, making them the gold standard.
Second, it elevated livery to the level of iconography. Marlboro, Rothmans JPS; these liveries remain timeless because of the saturation and storytelling from that era (even the efforts to get around explicit tobacco branding became iconic, and tobacco brands continued to find under-the-radar ways to sponsor motorsports into the 2020s). Even if they won’t openly admit it, it’s hard to imagine any livery designer today not reaching for a design that’s only fractionally as impactful as some of the tobacco-themed designs which are still remembered today, and very fondly.
Third, it created a vacuum, a permanent hunt for the next "vice." Alcohol, energy drinks, crypto; each has tried to fill the void tobacco left behind, with mixed results.
In short: tobacco built the economic architecture of modern motorsports.
Not because they loved racing, but because they could hack the system.
They didn’t sponsor the sport, they used it, to the point where the could actually influence the rules.
Did Tobacco Go All-In Elsewhere? Not Even Close.
While tobacco companies dabbled in other domains, no other sport or industry received the saturation-level investment they poured into motorsport.
Tobacco brands occasionally appeared on jerseys (Silk Cut apparently had involvement in rugby, but tellingly, details are hard to come by), but even then they were just one of many sponsors, with no control over presentation or scheduling. Sports clubs, as community institutions, could never be branded the way a race team could.
The Olympics were always too clean. Even in the 1980s, with looser regulation, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) made efforts to distance itself from tobacco money and let’s face it, the idea of associating cigarettes with physical excellence was already laughable.
In American sports, the U.S. began restricting tobacco advertising earlier than Europe. MLB started banning sponsorships in the 1950s and 60s, cigarette brands never got prime jersey real estate or naming rights. Stadium deals were rare, local, and lacked the global visibility tobacco craved.
As for fashion, film, and music? Sure, there were placements (actors and actresses smoked regularly in mid-century films) but these were passive, fragmented, and ultimately unscalable channels.
By contrast, motorsport offered not a billboard, but a canvas.
Only in racing did tobacco go from being a sponsor to an architect of the sport itself.
Motorsport was a branding dream and tobacco capitalized on it like no other.
Was it easier to be sponsored during the Tobacco Era? Yes…and no
If you were in the right place, with the right look, at the right time, it was absolutely easier. But it wasn’t an open book for everyone.
Tobacco had money to burn. These companies operated with massive marketing budgets and a mindset focused on domination, not just ROI. They funded not just teams but entire series, feeder programs, scholarships, and even circuits.
If you were picked, you were set.
Think Marlboro, Rothmans, Benson & Hedges, Camel, brands that became household names in large part due to their motorsport involvement.
But this wasn’t a free-for-all, Tobacco sponsors were extremely picky.
As any marketer would do today, they concentrated their money on top teams and highly visible, brand-aligned drivers. Many good drivers never got backing because they didn’t fit the brand image. Tobacco companies wanted walking advertisements: drivers who looked the part, were media-friendly, and ideally local heroes in key markets.
The environment was also cutthroat. With tobacco monopolizing team sponsorships, other brands stayed away. This made the ladder even harder for those outside the tobacco orbit. There was no robust second tier of sponsors. If you didn’t land a tobacco deal, your chances of making it were significantly lower.
There were also conflict risks. Tobacco brands were exclusive. One brand per team, per series. If Marlboro was already funding Ferrari, they weren’t backing your lower-tier campaign.
So yes, it was easier to get massive sponsorship, if you were one of the chosen few. But for everyone else, it was harder than ever. Tobacco crowded out other industries, distorted team economics, and made access more stratified.
The tobacco era was a golden parachute for the marketable and a closed shop for the rest.
It wasn’t meritocracy, it was marketing, plain and simple.
If you fit the brand fantasy, they funded your fantasy. If not, tough luck because the landscape for sponsorship was limited outside of that orbit.
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In less than 500 words.
Could any industry dominate the same way today?
If you're a team or a series today, from a financial point of view you would probably love to repeat the cash flow of this time, but the question isn’t: “How do we get another tobacco-style sponsor?”
It’s: “How do we offer that level of psychological leverage without the moral baggage?”
Today, no current industry has both the capital and the shameless incentive alignment tobacco had, but let’s be more systematic.
What made tobacco the ideal motorsport sponsor? Five things:
Massive margins: they could spend freely.
An addictive product with high customer lifetime value.
Intense regulatory pressure, driving them to whatever alternative marketing channels existed.
A male-dominated user base directly aligned with motorsport's demographic.
Strong visual identity and aspirational lifestyle positioning.
So who comes close today?
Crypto (at its peak) had massive budgets, a rebellious aesthetic, and a high-risk appetite. But now it's tainted with scandals and facing regulatory crackdowns, and crypto investments just don’t have the broad reach of cigarettes.
Online gambling and sports betting have huge margins, a constant need for new customers, and great demographic alignment. They operate globally and digitally, but they’re already heavily regulated and well exposed in other sports.
Energy drinks are an interesting possibility, with Red Bull having set the template, offering lifestyle branding, youth appeal, and willingness to back niche and extreme sports. Monster Energy is another example, but beyond that it’s hard to imagine anyone else making as much of an impact (Rich Energy is a recent example in F1 which ended terribly).
Luxury brands (watches, fashion, high-end cars) have motorsport heritage, high margins, and strong aesthetics. They’ll invest heavily, as LVMH has done in F1, but it’s hard to imagine luxury generally reaching the level of tobacco sponsorship, if only because mass market appeal is antithetical to the air of exclusivity that the luxury business aims to cultivate.
Tech, AI, and enterprise software have deep pockets and strategic motives, and names like Oracle, Google, and now Atlassian are deeply intwined with F1. But will they get to the all-encompassing level that tobacco reached? Likely not.
So what’s the actual answer? There isn’t one, you need a portfolio strategy:
Betting and crypto where it’s legal and feasible
Energy drinks and luxury for lifestyle association
Tech and SaaS for innovation-driven B2B deals
Regional disruptors like telcos or EV startups for strategic plays
And who could be next? Cannabis brands, once federally legal, offer massive growth potential, big budgets, and a need to rehab their image.
Fintech and neobanks also stand a chance. They want mass male engagement, they market aggressively, and they need a culturally relevant wedge.
You’re not going to get another Marlboro. But you can assemble a patchwork of Marlboro-like behavior across industries that share the key traits: high margins, hunger for attention, a willingness to provoke, and a deep understanding of identity-driven marketing.
This can be highly beneficial in getting you through economic times because many of these businesses are counter-cylical; just make sure that you are personally comfortable partnering with a certain industry and that existing sponsors don’t object to bringing on additional sponsors from “unconventional” industries.
So don’t chase the next tobacco. Chase the next industry under pressure to grow irrationally fast, because that’s where your money will be.
Main image credit: www.roadandtrack.com