The Race Is on the Track, but the Real Audiences are Moving Through Our Cities

Every year, the conversation around the Grand Prix follows the exact same script in both cities: Who bought the title sponsorship? Which logos are on the cars? Who booked the trackside suite? Makes sense; those are the loudest buys and easily the most expensive. But focusing only on the grid misses the bigger play, and this year there are two of them. Sepang from 2 to 4 October, Marina Bay from 9 to 11 October. According to official Singapore Tourism Board data, the 2025 Singapore Grand Prix alone drew 300,641 attendees over the weekend. A handful of brands paid millions to be attached to the action on the track, while everyone else got access to that exact same audience at no cost at all. Those visitors still need coffee, a bed, a SIM card, dinner, and something to do during eight empty hours before the cars start running. Race week belongs to the track sponsors, sure, but across both cities, it is also a massive commercial gold rush for businesses that have zero connection to motorsport.

The two circuits are opposites, and media buyers rarely treat either one as such. Marina Bay isn't an isolated stadium in a field. It is a street circuit running right through working business districts, hotels, and malls. In most host cities, "the track" and "the city" are two totally different places. Here, they share the same address. Sepang is the inversion. It sits about 45 minutes south of Kuala Lumpur, right beside KLIA, so the actual hosting happens somewhere else entirely, spread across Bukit Bintang, KLCC, Bangsar, and various hotels. Fans land, check in, eat, shop, and only make the run south when they have to.

You'd think Singapore's setup makes buying ad space around the bay a no-brainer. Actually, it does the opposite. Because every planner has the exact same idea, those obvious trackside screens get marked up to absurd levels. And paying a premium for proximity isn't the same thing as paying for attention, which is a distinction the industry keeps failing to make. Only 44 cents of every digital dollar ever reaches a real person, and buying the most crowded inventory in the city at a markup does nothing to fix that. It just makes the waste more expensive. In Malaysia, the same mistake wears a different costume. Buy the circuit, and you have bought the one place this audience spends the least time.

Then you have to look at how the weekend actually flows around a night race. Singapore's green flag doesn't drop until 8 PM on Sunday, and Friday and Saturday nights are built the same way. The gates open in the afternoon, which leaves visitors with a ton of dead time to kill across the city. Where are they during those hours? Not standing in front of the Merlion taking photos all day. That's a five-minute tourist moment, not a buying moment. The actual decisions happen in transit: sitting in a Changi taxi, waiting for a bus in Bugis, walking between malls on Orchard, or standing on an MRT platform. Those unglamorous, high-friction minutes when someone is figuring out where to eat or shop next are where the real audience attention lives.

Kuala Lumpur runs a longer version of the same thing. KLIA to KL Sentral, the Airport Express trains (ERL platforms), the tolls on the highway south, the train into the city centre. That run is where the weekend gets decided, because it is the longest uninterrupted stretch of attention anyone is going to get across all three days. A brand that owns that corridor is reaching this audience long before the circuit ever gets a look in, and it is doing it while people are still working out where they are going to eat, stay, and spend.

There's another reason this audience is absurdly valuable: context. When people travel, their usual brand loyalty breaks down. They are picking restaurants, rides, and retail on the fly. For three days in each market, you get a dense pool of high-spending consumers making real-time choices, and then they get on a plane and leave. Calling this crowd "F1 fans" is too simplistic. Some are corporate execs at client dinners, some are there strictly for the flex through luxury dining and hotel bars, while others just came for the concerts. They stay in different neighbourhoods, spend on different things, and run on different clocks. The only common denominator is that they are constantly moving.

Then there's the part almost nobody seems to be planning for. Two races, one week apart, in two markets with two different audiences. Most brands will treat them as two unrelated buys, with two plans, two sets of media owners and two sets of reports. The smarter version is to plan them as one sequence. Run Kuala Lumpur first, see what works, and carry that into Singapore a week later.

Movement is where the money is, but traditional out-of-home planning is notoriously fragmented. Booking a connected route meant weeks of manual spreadsheet work, negotiating with a dozen different media owners, and dealing with mismatched systems, all of which caused a fatal delay during a tight three-day window. Doing it twice, across two countries, in eight days, is worse. That is why we built Race Journeys at Moving Walls. It connects existing networks so a brand can plan a single, unified sequence across street-level screens without requiring media owners to rip out and replace their existing CMS. It hits people where they wait, not just where they take selfies.

You don't need to guess if this works, either. When AirAsia ran a multi-location campaign across 37 sites in nine Malaysian states, they used our platform to swap creative messages in real time based on live data. The campaign delivered 29 million impressions, beating forecasts by 30%, and drove a measurable lift in regional flight bookings. More importantly, it gave their team real-time proof-of-play reporting, allowing them to adjust on the fly. We see this exact same dynamic play out with premium hotel and hospitality brands targeting high-net-worth travellers. By orchestrating screens along the airport-to-hotel corridors that those guests are actually travelling, they extend the campaigns they are already running on social into the physical world, rather than buying a billboard and hoping the right people drive past it.

When you have a three-day window like race week, you don't get a second chance to fix a failing ad; you need that exact agility. You get two of those windows this year, one week apart. Race week belongs to the sponsors. In Kuala Lumpur and in Singapore, the audience belongs to the city.