America’s Cup Engineered For Anti-Climax.

The 33rd America’s Cup is once again tarnishing the sport of sailing. The question on the minds (and lips) of the ordinary fan in the street, after the second race cancellation in 3 days, is “How can a 90 foot boat not be able to handle 17knts of wind and 1.3 metre waves?”

The sailing public has been conditioned to think of sailors as a hardy lot. The Volvo Ocean Race is extreme sailing and the Vendee Globe competitors can manage the Southern Ocean on their own. The America’s Cup and the Olympics has also had its fair share of challenging conditions.

But the 33rd Edition of the America’s Cup is different. The competing teams have been so focused on trying to outwit and outmanoeuvre each other, that they have ended up with boats apparently so fragile that they can’t sail in conditions that most sailors would relish.

The result is that the sport in this form cannot be televised. Fans are expected to be able to just sit and wait, not just for a few hours, but days. Even Wimbledon, without a roof and the fickle British weather, usually manages to complete the required matches in its TV window.

The other question that people on the outside are asking is, why do you have to wait a day between race days? The official line is that the Deed of Gift requires it, but since we have been trained to read every single word in the document. Here’s what it says:

‘and one week day shall intervene between the conclusion of one race and the starting of the next race.’

Here’s the text that appears in the Notice of Race:

The Race Committee shall add at any time any number of additional Reserve Days as may be necessary to determine a winner of the Match. Both competitors have agreed one (1) day shall intervene between each completed race and such intervening day need not be a week day.

If a race is cancelled, abandoned or postponed that race will be sailed on the next scheduled date and the subsequent races shall be postponed for the day accordingly.

It’s all very pedantic and traditional. It’s completely baffling to a mass market and it ultimately has a detrimental effect on the perception of the sport. Organisers need to abandon the idea that the quirks of of the sport somehow make it special. The America’s Cup is one of the only sailing events that broadcasters would consider televising live, but after two days of sitting and waiting it is understandable why the official web feed is being given away (for a small fee).

Luckily, the America’s Cup is only one event amongst many in sailing and we still have events like the Volvo Ocean Race and the Extreme Sailing Series that are run by people who understand that the sailors are not the only stakeholders and modifications have to be made to make the event as attractive as possible for television. Sailing can be broadcast live – the Sydney Hobart Race starts at the same time on the same day, irrespective of the weather. The first race of the 33rd America’s Cup is now scheduled to be run on Friday.

Coverage of the 33rd America’s Cup is presented by the DARK BLUE BOOK

Valencia Weather Imposes Injunction on America’s Cup 33 Race One.

Race one of the DOG match between Alinghi and BMW ORACLE was scheduled to be held on Monday morning, but it seems that all the money and all the lawyers in the world are powerless to influence the weather in Valencia. The wind meandered lightly around the enormous course and made it impossible for race officials to set a fair course.

While those in Europe had the opportunity to spend a lazy Monday morning waiting, those in New Zealand and California were frustrated once again by the 33rd America’s Cup.

The most interesting issues of the day then were around media. BMW ORACLE have their own dedicated TV crew and studio; an experienced team of people who have been innovating with broadcast technology via the World Match Racing Tour in recent years. The American team provided a live stream of the boat leaving the dock and also a pre-race show with interviews and insight from the team base.

Meanwhile, the official feed showed the pre-race press conference right up until minutes before the scheduled race start window of 10am local time. Commentators Peter Montgomery and Cam Lewis filled for a bit with some shots of the huge boats bobbing around in the still water before the race was postponed.

One might have thought, given the predisposition of America’s Cup races to be postponed, that the organisers would have had a contingency, but instead the official feed showed a locked off camera without commentary for the next 4 hours until the race was finally abandoned.

Technically, the live webstream provided on www.americascup.com struggled to cope. There were widespread reports of the bespoke player not working on the high-resolution setting and not working at all on the Google Chrome browser. Luckily, the feed was provided to several other sites including Skysports.com and YouTube whose superior bandwidth held up better.

Eurosport, who had dedicated live time to the race, hung on for as long as they could before switching to Ski-Jumping.

BMW ORACLE’s Feed includes live statistics of how many people were watching. The number hovered around 1800 for most of the day with a peak around 2500. Interestingly, the Livestream insights show over 1 million minutes have been viewed. For those who are confused, the 1 million number is cumulative – so could be 16,000 people watching for an hour or 2000 people watching for 8.3 hours or some other combination.

The day was not a good one for sailing. At the beginning of the day, there was a real sense of expectation, but the weather just wasn’t going to play. Perhaps it was some kind of divine justice intervening to say – you made us all wait, now you will.

The next race scheduled for 9am GMT on Wednesday the 10th of February.

America’s Cup News is brought to you by the DARK BLUE BOOK

America’s Cup Fans Might See More than Ever thanks to Media Innovations

Now that the two teams contesting the 33rd America’s Cup have been told that they can’t go back to court until after the racing, the communications teams and PR people are finally focusing their attention on sailing.

Despite the ugliness of the road to racing, this edition of the Cup will probably contribute more to the sport in technological innovation than any that has gone before it. The innovation is not just in the boats – the media used to bring the 33rd America’s Cup to the world will be groundbreaking and have impact on how niche sports are broadcast.

Of course sailing has been at the forefront of media for a while. On board cameras and telemetry based 3d animations are just some of the tools that allow sailing fans to interact with their sport in a way that is more personal and bespoke than a traditional one-feed-for-all approach that some sports tied to old fashioned TV offer.

Cameras are getting smaller, bandwidth is getting cheaper. Live coverage,  that was once only possible with satellite trucks and outside broadcast infrastructure, can now be streamed via a mobile phone. Add to that the absence of  ‘media rights’ for the America’s Cup – no stadium, no tickets with Terms and Conditions forbidding photography or video, and literally anyone can create content from this event.

In addition to the offical web-broadcast via americascup.com BMW ORACLE will be providing their own media. The team will produce unprecedented online coverage of its challenge for the 33rd America’s Cup, beginning with a team press conference on Friday February 5.

The team’s “Race Day” coverage, on www.bmworacleracing.com, will feature hours of live, original programming each race day, including the official live feed of the racing from the Host Broadcaster.

“Race Day” programming kicks off on Monday, February 8, the first scheduled race day of the Match. “Race Day” consists of several blocks of live programming, bringing an unprecedented, live, behind-the-scenes look at the team to sailing fans worldwide including…

• The Dock-Out Show – watch the team prepare for battle as they leave for the race course.
• The Morning Show – an insider’s look at the history of the America’s Cup, the 33rd edition of the oldest trophy in sports, and BMW ORACLE Racing, live from the Oracle Cinema at the Team Base.

Extreme Sailing Series 2009 Media Numbers.

The Extreme Sailing Series Europe, previously known as the iShares Cup have released their media analysis of the 2009 season. The organisers, OC Events should be congratulated, not only for having their numbers independently audited, but also making them available. Some might see such transparency as a brave strategy in the current climate, but it shows that sailing can deliver tangible results.

The world of sponsorship and advertising is changing and one of the biggest challenges for those buying and selling sponsorship and advertising is how to measure the value of the results.

For some sailors, it doesn’t matter – many still send sponsorship proposals that are generic presentations of where the race starts and ends, how long the boat is and what the weight of the keel bulb is. For these sailors, sponsorship is more like a donation, the sponsor gets a warm fuzzy feeling that they are in some way helping someone go sailing.

At the other end of the spectrum are events whose very existence is based on whether or not they give value to their commercial partners. Traditionally, measurements like Equivalent Media Value have been used to measure how much  a sponsorship is worth. Some think that it is flawed, but there is no real alternative at the moment.

The Equivalent Media Value approach adds up all the exposure that a sponsor got on various media and then values it as if they had bought it as an advertiser. Here’s an example: If your logo is seen for 1 second 30 times during the Superbowl and the cost of buying 30 seconds of advertising at the Superbowl is $3 million, then the equivalent media value of your sponsorship is $3 million. If you paid $300,000 for your sponsorship, then your return on investment is 10:1.

It’s nice to see a sports property being realistic about their numbers. Compare the hyperbole from the America’s Cup yesterday where a press release talked of  “a massive international audience of over two billion viewers,” with the more grounded figures below.

The headline figure from OC Events was a 40% increase in the value of media coverage versus the previous year, as measured by independent evaluation agency Havas Sponsorship Insights. Havas has conservatively estimated the value of media coverage achieved by the Extreme Sailing Series in 2009 as €5.9million.

Notable numbers from a detailed report covering six markets in Europe include:

• over 8h 35 minutes of evaluated TV news (only) broadcasts,
• 894 articles or features evaluated in printed media,
• 770 articles on the internet,
• 149 broadcast features evaluated on TV and radio and
• 228 accredited media attending the seven events (the Paris launch and six events).
• In addition, UK terrestrial station, Channel 4, broadcast a specially produced stand-alone highlights programme for the first time in 2009 and are now interested in broadcasting a full series of programmes in 2010.

Over 535 hours of TV exposure, between news and programming, was evaluated alongside print exposure in publications with an 82 million cumulative circulation.

OC Group are one of the few sailing properties to value Return on Objectives as highly as the pure ROI numbers. The sponsor, iShares, had very specific goals for the event, some qualitative, that cannot be boiled down into a couple of bullet points. Lou Newlands, Communications Director,  OC Group said:

“We see a lot of figures bandied around the sport which simply don’t correspond to reality, so we prefer to use our independent evaluations primarily to measure our own performance and to drive us to increase quantity and quality of coverage for both the event and team sponsors”,

“We are really pleased with the outcome, particularly in such a tough economic time with the drop in advertising rates (used as basis for evaluation). We decided that we wanted to apply harsher and ‘realistic’ figures on the value of media return for our teams and sponsors. Havas applies these marketplace values to the coverage, evaluating each piece individually, therefore in some areas, particularly the internet, the quantity and quality has increased, but the value is lower than last year. We feel confident in these figures – in particular as a measure on our performance year on year.”

Alastair Macdonald, Director, Havas Sponsorship Insights commented,

“Given the nature and value of the benefits delivered for the title partner iShares, our view would be that, relative to the scale of investment involved from the sponsor, the sponsorship represents a highly cost-effective marketing investment, delivering an extremely favourable rate of return.”

2010 will be an interesting year for the Extreme Sailing Series Europe. Without a title sponsor, there may be innovations that the organisers can implement that are more risky. OC Events say that the PR Strategy will be sent to all teams on 15 March, with an increasing inclusion of social media – empowering tools such as Facebook and Twitter. While such social media are anecdotally very powerful tools, Equivalent Media Value fails to measure them effectively.

A detailed view of the numbers can be found at : http://www.extremesailingserieseurope.com/news.asp

Virtual Eye – The only way to watch the Louis Vuitton Trophy, Nice.

If you’re going to put on a yacht racing regatta in Nice in November with less than 6 months notice to the public, you need a way to let people watch. Monohulls miles offshore sailing in little or no wind and an air temperature of 9-12 degrees celcius means that only the most hard-core race fan is going to be watching the action on the water.

The Louis Vuitton Trophy is giving race fans sitting in the warmth of their offices with an internet connection a way of watching and hearing the action. While the addition of radio commentary to any feed adds incredible depth to the coverage, the Louis Vuitton Trophy is also utilising the 3D animations provided by Virtual Eye.

Unlike the initial regatta in Auckland, where the Virtual Eye coverage was not available outside New Zealand, the rich live coverage in Nice points to the way that sailing can be a compelling media product.

One of the highlights of the recent Volvo Ocean Race was the live on-the-water commentary, by none other than organiser CEO Knut Frostad, for race starts and in port races. The Volvo Ocean Race live coverage also featured 2D tracking feeds, but the Virtual Eye shows what can be done.

David Fuller, CEO of Pilote Media, a digital sports marketing agency says:

It’s great to see sailing innovate with this kind of presentation. I followed the last America’s Cup almost entirely from my desk and sometimes you get a better experience than a camera can give.

The next phase for sailing can be seen when you look at what sports like NASCAR are doing with their ‘RACEVIEW‘ product. This takes it one step further and not only integrates live timing and scoring, telemetry and audio, but also allows the fan to control the camera angles.

What comes after can include a full emersion solution where you feed the telemetry and GPS data into something like Virtual Sailor and create the ability for gamers to race in real-time against the sailors.

Sailing’s niche sport status means that most events will not be covered live by mass-media with some exceptions like the start of the Sydney Hobart Race in Australia. The sport does need to keep looking over the fence at other best practise aroudn the world. There are opportunities to deliver content to mobile devices and change the mix from broadcast to interactivity.

David cites another example where online and emerging technology came together:

The 2009 Indy 500 put a live Twitter feed beside the web video streaming of the event. This allowed fans to send messages of support to drivers and engage with other fans.

The future of sailing media will be one of the topics discussed at the World Yacht Racing Forum in Monaco in December.

• You can watch the live Louis Vuitton Trophy here – if there is any wind! – www.louisvuittontrophy.com
• You can see what people are saying on Twitter here

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