The trouble with a cameo is that it ends.

SharkNinja discovered this after its products appeared in last year's Brad Pitt racing film, which did exactly what a Brad Pitt racing film is supposed to do: it got people excited, briefly, and then it stopped being in theaters. Fans noticed the brand. Some of them even figured out that Shark and Ninja were, in fact, the same company. And then everyone went back to their lives.

"The movie was great but it spiked and then it left," said Laura Dyer, senior vice president of global brand and partnerships at SharkNinja.

So the company has done what brands do when they want something more durable than a spike: it has signed a five-year sponsorship deal with McLaren, the Formula 1 racing team. The arrangement covers four racing series and includes access to McLaren's engineers and its drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, who between them have the sort of social media following that makes marketing executives breathe more quickly.

Ms. Dyer was clear that she does not want the drivers reading scripts. "Getting them to do the things that they're comfortable with is way better than handing someone a script and saying 'there you go,'" she said. If Mr. Norris posts about a blender, it will be because he wanted to. (Whether a Formula 1 driver has strong feelings about blenders remains, for now, an open question.)

The deal began in mid-September, earlier than the usual winter unveiling, because SharkNinja asked McLaren if anything could go live before the year was out. McLaren said yes. This gives the brand what Ms. Dyer described, in essence, as practice time — a few months to learn how to be a major sports sponsor before the 2027 season begins in earnest.

SharkNinja's previous sports efforts were smaller and shorter: an appliance partnership at the Women's Rugby World Cup, a social campaign with Thierry Henry and Peter Crouch arguing about Euro 2024 watch parties. Both were over in weeks. McLaren is something else entirely.

The engineering collaboration may prove as valuable as the marketing. McLaren's engineers will spend a set number of hours each year working with SharkNinja's team in Needham, Mass., on problems like battery life. Whether any of this results in a McLaren-branded product remains unclear. Ms. Dyer did not say. But she did note that SharkNinja is "really obsessive about the concept of marginal gains."

This is the direction sports sponsorship has been heading for some time. Live sports remain one of the few places where large audiences watch the same thing simultaneously, and brands have noticed. What they want now is not just a logo on the car but a relationship with the people who care about the car — and, increasingly, the people driving it.

The film, it turns out, was the inflection point. Before it came out, Ms. Dyer said, "people saw us as Shark and Ninja." Afterward, they saw SharkNinja. The distinction matters more than it might seem.

Original story published in Digiday: "Sports new currency is fandom and SharkNinja is cashing with FI", by Krystal Scanlon, Seb Joseph