Turning global partnerships into fan experiences

Turning partnership reach into meaningful fan participation

During my time at Binance, the company was building partnerships with some of the most recognisable names in global sport and entertainment. The commercial value of those relationships was obvious: Cristiano Ronaldo brought one of the largest individual fan bases in sport, Pierre Gasly connected Binance with Formula 1, and The Weeknd took the brand into stadiums across multiple markets. The more interesting challenge was what happened after the partnership had been signed. A global name can create attention, but attention on its own does not create a useful customer experience.

My work sat in the layer between the partnership and the activation. Depending on the programme, that meant helping shape campaign mechanics, translating a global partnership into something fans could actively participate in, supporting the operational setup across markets and venues, and coordinating with the teams responsible for product, creative, legal, partnerships, regional execution and communications. I was not the owner of every asset or every workstream, and these were large cross-functional programmes. My contribution was helping turn partnership rights into experiences that made sense for the audience and could actually be delivered.

A common problem across three very different audiences

The three partnerships looked completely different on the surface, but they shared the same underlying question: how do you move a fan from seeing a sponsor logo to doing something meaningful with the brand? With Ronaldo, the answer involved digital collectibles, utility and access. With Gasly, it was co-creation, giving fans the chance to design something that would appear in an actual Grand Prix. With The Weeknd, it meant connecting a global stadium tour with physical and digital experiences that could be repeated across different countries.

That made the work much broader than conventional partnership communications. The campaigns had to connect the external talent or property with a clear customer proposition, a participation mechanic and an operational model. My involvement varied by programme, but the recurring areas included:

• helping translate partnership rights into campaign and fan-experience mechanics;
• working across global and regional stakeholders to make the activation executable;
• supporting product, landing-page, eligibility, reward and customer-journey requirements;
• coordinating operational details around launches and live-event environments; and
• ensuring the activation had a reason for the fan to participate rather than simply observe.

Cristiano Ronaldo: building more utility into the partnership over successive drops

Binance's multi-year partnership with Cristiano Ronaldo had already established NFTs as the core digital format. By the second and third collections, the challenge was no longer simply introducing the concept of a Ronaldo NFT. Each drop needed a clearer proposition for existing collectors, new Binance users and Ronaldo fans who might have little interest in crypto outside the partnership. I supported the second and third launches and was also involved in planning the next phase of the programme before leaving Binance.

The second collection, ForeverCR7: The GOAT, launched in July 2023 and was structured around memorable goals from Ronaldo's career. More than 29,000 NFTs were created across four rarity tiers, with utility increasing alongside rarity. The highest-value collectibles connected digital ownership with real experiences such as an in-person training session with Ronaldo, while other tiers included signed merchandise, personal content and access to later drops. The campaign therefore had to communicate both the story behind the collectible and the increasingly complex reward structure around it.

The third launch, CR7 ForeverZone, moved the model further toward acquisition and participation. Binance distributed 50,000 ForeverZone boxes, including signed merchandise, NFTs from the previous collections, event tickets and a Golden Ticket that gave one fan the opportunity to train with Ronaldo. Participation was also connected with identity verification and referral mechanics, so the campaign had to work for several audiences at once: existing CR7 collectors, current Binance customers and new fans entering the ecosystem through Ronaldo.

I also contributed to planning around the fourth Ronaldo collection before my time at Binance ended. The programme that later launched as Forever Worldwide: The Road to Saudi Arabia in 2024 used seven locations from Ronaldo's career as the structure for another collectible journey. Because the final launch took place after my departure, I would describe my role publicly as contributing to the planning phase rather than claiming ownership of the finished campaign.

Pierre Gasly: letting the fan create part of the race itself

The Pierre Gasly activation approached participation from a different direction. Instead of asking fans to purchase or claim a digital asset, the concept invited them to design the helmet Gasly would wear at the 2023 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. I helped develop the competition concept and the campaign mechanics, turning a sponsorship relationship into a creative challenge that connected Binance, Gasly and the Formula 1 audience around a tangible outcome.

The customer journey required more than a social post asking people to submit designs. Participants needed design specifications, a submission route, eligibility criteria, a judging process, social amplification and a clear prize. The winning design would ultimately be manufactured and worn by Gasly during the final race of the season, while the winner received a signed replica. Binance also encouraged participants to share their work through the #GASLYxBinance campaign, creating an organic content loop around the competition.

The first iteration received more than 700 submissions from over 140 countries. That response is useful because it demonstrates participation rather than passive reach, and the underlying idea proved durable enough for Binance and Gasly to reuse the helmet-design format for a later Formula 1 activation. For me, the lesson was that a sponsorship becomes substantially more interesting when the audience is given a role inside the story rather than being treated only as spectators.

The Weeknd: operationalising a Web3 partnership across a live European tour

The Weeknd's After Hours Til Dawn tour created a different challenge because the partnership had to work across both physical venues and digital channels. Binance was the official crypto sponsor of the global tour, with the broader programme including commemorative NFTs, co-branded merchandise, online challenges and Web3 experiences. When the European leg began in 2023, the partnership also incorporated on-site augmented-reality experiences and the Enter The Dimension digital environment, allowing fans to participate even if they were not attending a concert.

My contribution was primarily operational. I helped support the setup of Binance's activation as the tour moved across the UK and Europe, where the fixed nature of live events made execution particularly unforgiving. Venue requirements, physical assets, local stakeholders, customer-facing mechanics and regional coordination had to come together around dates that could not move. Unlike a purely digital campaign, an issue discovered after doors opened could not simply be pushed into the next product sprint.

The public programme was operating at significant scale. By August 2023, Binance reported that the tour had engaged three million fans across North America and Europe, more than 30,000 fans had joined online challenges through Enter The Dimension, and more than 15,000 Souvenir NFTs had been claimed across 14 countries. Those are overall partnership figures rather than results I attribute personally to my work, but they provide useful context for the environment in which the European activation was being delivered.

Three different ways of turning reach into participation

Looking across the programmes together is more useful than treating them as three unrelated celebrity campaigns. Each one used a different participation model, which meant the marketing and operational requirements changed with it. The partnership name created the reach, while the activation design determined whether the fan had a meaningful reason to engage.

The common operating model was to begin with the audience rather than the sponsorship asset. We needed to understand what the fan could realistically be asked to do, what value they would receive, how that behaviour connected back to Binance, and what teams or systems were required to make the journey work. That meant partnership marketing often crossed into product design, operations, regional execution and customer experience rather than sitting neatly inside a communications function.

What these programmes changed in how I think about partnerships

The strongest partnership is not necessarily the one with the largest celebrity or the greatest number of impressions. Reach creates an opportunity, but the activation has to convert that opportunity into behaviour. A fan designing an F1 helmet, claiming a collectible tied to an athlete they follow or encountering a digital experience around a stadium tour has a much more active relationship with the partnership than somebody who has simply seen a logo.

These programmes also reinforced something I had first encountered earlier in my career through Litecoin and UFC: crypto adoption is partly a distribution and cultural challenge. Many people are unlikely to begin by developing an abstract interest in blockchain technology. They may first encounter the technology through football, motorsport, music, gaming or another part of culture they already understand. The role of the activation is to make that first interaction relevant enough that the technology supports the experience rather than becoming an unnecessary barrier to it.

At Binance, the scale of that problem became much greater. The company could partner with globally recognised talent, but those relationships still had to be translated into customer propositions, campaign mechanics and operating plans that worked across products and markets. Working across Ronaldo, Gasly and The Weeknd gave me practical experience of that translation and showed me how much of effective partnership marketing happens after the sponsorship agreement has already been signed.