For most of its life Apple’s advertising operation was an afterthought attached to the services division: a search slot in the App Store, a promotional placement on the Music tab, a few branded cards that appeared where the company decided they would appear. Selling thirty-second spots to carmakers was not part of the plan. Live sports changed the arithmetic.
Todd Teresi, Apple’s vice president of advertising, told The Hollywood Reporter that Formula 1 has become a meaningful contributor to advertising revenue on Apple TV, and that brand-lift research commissioned by the company showed sponsors posting gains in familiarity, favorability and purchase intent among viewers. Apple is now selling inventory for the second F1 season, with American Express and Ford among the first advertisers signed.
The disclosure is the clearest signal yet of how Apple intends to pay for sports rights it acquired at considerable cost. The company won the American broadcast package for Formula 1 beginning with the 2026 season, a deal that put grand prix racing behind a subscription for the first time in the United States market, and it has been building an advertising business around the audience that arrives with it.
Sports inventory is attractive for reasons that have little to do with the racing. Viewers watch live, so they cannot skip the breaks, and a large share of the audience is watching with other people in the room, which advertisers pay extra for because a shared screen means a shared conversation. Ratings for F1 in the United States have risen sharply since the Netflix documentary series introduced the sport to an audience that had never watched a race, and the schedule, spread across time zones, gives a streaming service something to sell on a Sunday morning when nothing else is on.
The brand-lift study is the part advertisers will press on. Such research typically surveys viewers before and after a campaign and asks whether they recognize the brand, whether they feel better about it, and whether they would consider buying. The method is imprecise: samples are small, recall is unreliable, and the measured lift often reflects the enthusiasm of people who already liked the sport. Teresi’s claim is nonetheless the argument Apple needs, because sponsorship budgets are approved on exactly that kind of evidence.
Apple’s advertising business has been quietly growing for several years. The company sells placements in the App Store, in Apple News and in its television coverage, and it has been hiring sales staff with backgrounds at traditional networks and at rival streamers. It has also kept the business deliberately small relative to its hardware revenue, which is one reason the company has been able to describe advertising as a service to developers rather than as surveillance by another name.
That positioning is now under strain. Apple’s privacy rules, which require apps to ask permission before tracking users across other companies’ services, crimped the measurement that advertisers rely on and cost Meta and others billions in revenue. Selling its own inventory means Apple now has to answer the same questions it once used as a weapon: what an advertiser gets to know about who saw a spot, and how quickly the numbers arrive.
Competitors have the same idea. Netflix built an advertising tier and has been pushing into live events, Amazon puts ads in front of Prime Video viewers by default, and Disney has been selling sports inventory for decades. All of them are chasing the same finite pool of brand budgets, and all of them are discovering that live sports is the one format that still delivers a mass audience at a moment when the rest of television fragments.
For Apple, the appeal is structural. Services revenue carries a higher margin than hardware and does not depend on a product cycle, and advertising sits inside that line. A sports package that fills a subscription funnel and sells sponsorships at the same time does double duty, which is why the company has been willing to absorb the cost of rights that would look expensive to a pure broadcaster.
There are constraints. Apple cannot flood its broadcasts with commercials without annoying the subscribers who pay for the service, and the company has built its brand on restraint. Ad load on Apple TV remains light compared with linear television, and the company has been slow to build the self-serve tools that would let smaller advertisers buy without a sales call. Both choices limit revenue and protect the product.
The second F1 season will be the test. Advertisers who bought the first year on novelty will decide whether the audience held, whether the lift persisted, and whether the rates Apple is quoting reflect what the inventory is worth. American Express and Ford give the company two blue-chip names to put in front of other buyers, in categories, payments and automotive, where sports sponsorship is a standard line item rather than an experiment.
Teresi has said the company is building for the long term, and Apple rarely exits a category it has decided to enter. What it has not said is how large the advertising business is meant to become, or whether the company sees it as a rounding error on services or as a business in its own right. The answer will show up in the rates it charges next season, and in how many breaks it is willing to sell.
