Mr Beazley said:

“Two of our main aims at Perth 2011 are to increase awareness of the Perth 2011 ISAF Sailing World Championships and to raise the profile of the sport of sailing. The partnership with WAtoday.com.au will provide a significant boost to the Sailing World Championships with promotion of the Event and the sport, through local and national coverage via its sister sites – smh.com.au, theage.com.au and brisbanetimes.com.au – and through international readership opportunities.”

WAtoday.com.au Marketing Manager Nicola Brandon agreed that the collaboration was exciting saying:

“WAtoday.com.au is thrilled to come on board as the media partner for Perth 2011. This is a great event for sailing and for Perth. WAtoday.com.au delivers Western Australia with high quality breaking news and we look forward to sharing this Event with our visitors.”

The partnership should assist in driving traffic to the Perth 2011 website, however a quick search of the WAtoday.com.au website shows that the media outlet is a little light on sailing content, despite Perth being the home of some of Australia’s best sailors. While the portal reports on Belcher and Page winning the 470 World Championships last week, a search for Torvar Mirsky – who represents Western Australia in the World Match Racing Tour and is ranked 3rd in the world, returns zero search results.

More Olympic Sailing News…

In 2008, Match Cup Sweden boasted all the state of the art media trappings that are now being offered by large, well funded events like the Audi Med Cup and the Louis Vuitton Trophy. There were giant screens, live audio commentary (which was simulcast on local radio) and live streaming video to the internet.

This year, boat sponsor Sigma, will also be the official strategic IT-partner. Sigma has developed an on-line strategy to integrate the digital communication with the overall experience.

Magnus Edvardsson, Business Area manager at Sigma:

“The company is in an exciting stage of development and it is important for us to involve our clients and co-workers on this journey. Stena Match Cup Sweden will serve as a good, high quality activity and a special way to get together. The efforts we have put into the sponsorship so far have really paid off and we can already see a strong commitment internally.”

As a boat sponsor, Sigma will brand one of the eight boats, which are used in the ISAF World Match Racing Tour event. In addition, they have big plans on-site during the event between the 5th-11th of July.

The event organizer is excited with the new partnership in many ways.

Martin Sohtell, Event manager of Stena Match Cup Sweden:

“It’s great to have Sigma as partner to the event and our cooperation got off to a flying start. Sigma has an innovative organization and great skills, which will benefit the event in many ways. Shortly, we will have the pleasure to launch a digital platform for our overall communication, which adds a new dimension to the entire event, all thanks to Sigma.”

More World Match Racing Tour News…

The City of Kerteminde in Denmark will stage the 2010 RS:X World Windsurfing Championships from 27 August – 5 September and the event will feature a new platform created by Zenitel and TracTrac.

‘Sailstream – You are the producer’ will allow spectators in Kerteminde to watch the racing on giant screens ashore and give a global audience the opportunity to watch live action on their computer screens. The idea behind the concept is a combination of GPS-tracking, live streaming and course commentary, which should make the spectator experience exceptionally exciting.

Jacob Møhl from Sail Event Kerteminde says:

“This game changing technology lets the spectator choose which video stream he or she wishes to watch, hence the tag line ‘You Are The Producer’. Both the tracking technology and live video images will be seen on the same web page.”

The core of the concept is that three or more video cameras can move independently from point to point on the race track, transmitting directly from the water to the Internet. This will allow key points of the course to be moniored including the start, mark roundings and slalom sections of the course as well as the finish.

Spectators can choose the prefferred camera angle and the GPS tracking adds an extra data stream to make following the competitors more easy. Live commentary will add yet another layer of coverage to explain the images to a wider audience.

Mike Dempsey, RS:X Class President said:

“It’s fantastic for the RS:X Class to be so closely involved in this cutting edge development which will bring Olympic sailing closer to a global audience than ever before. We have been working hard to develop our online media presence for three years. Now with ‘Sailstream’, we’re moving on to cloud servers to handle the expected traffic.”

The city of Kerteminde, anxious to brand itself as the world’s most cozy Lilliputian sailing city will be dressed for the RS:X World Championships. It has officially named the week ‘World Water Week’ and will stage a lot of water related side-activities.

More Streaming and Tracking News…

The Copenhagen based company has signed up to become Official Sponsor of Satellite and Radio Communications Equipment for the third consecutive race. The agreement means that Thrane & Thrane’s latest generations of SAILOR® FleetBroadband and VHF equipment will be onboard every cutting-edge Volvo Open 70 as they line up in Alicante for the start of the race in October 2011.

Knut Frostad, Volvo Ocean Race CEO said:

“We have once again selected Thrane & Thrane to provide a comprehensive communications package for the teams, based on the support and faultless performance of the SAILOR equipment in the previous two races. We need the latest and best technology to ensure our vision and commitment of bringing the extreme offshore racing to a global TV and web audience. In this context we’re delighted to have Thrane & Thrane back onboard, and we’re confident that their latest FleetBroadband and VHF solutions will facilitate unmatched broadband and safety communication to the racing crews.”

The scope of supply for the 2011-2012 race includes new generation products. With the World’s first 2nd generation FleetBroadband antenna, the in-house developed SAILOR 500 FleetBroadband will be the central communication hub for each race team. From upload of race footage, reports and interviews for television and web, to download of weather data vital for competitive navigation performance, all of the teams will benefit from true broadband communication along the entire course around the globe.

The teams will also benefit from the compact SAILOR 150 FleetBroadband for crew voice calling and IP data whilst two SAILOR mini-C systems will be onboard for constant positioning data and global safety communication.

Walther Thygesen, CEO, Thrane & Thrane said:

“The Volvo Ocean Race really is about Life at the Extreme so we relish the challenge of putting our equipment through its paces once again. It is the ultimate test platform and we receive invaluable and immediate feedback from the crews, which has made Volvo Ocean Race an integral part of our product development process. Our products have performed consistently successful during the two previous races and if the SAILOR products can withstand such an ultimate test, then their credentials as the toughest most reliable communications equipment for all maritime applications are well deserved.”

More Volvo Ocean Race News…

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

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

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.

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

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

Both races feature UK teams, so we decided to follow both events using the web. While the Louis Vuitton Trophy came way out ahead in terms of the experience, the teams competing in the TJV seemed to evoke a much more personal response from fans.

Following on from the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series held in Auckland at the beginning of the year, the Louis Vuitton Trophy, held in Nice, is providing live streaming of video and an an audio commentary for each race, augmented by the cool Virtual Eye animations that allow non-sailing fans to get a really good handle on what is going on – they need it too – racing is quite a way offshore and with an air temperature of 9-10 degrees Celsius, it would be a keen fan indeed that was watching from the water. The French based Transat Jacques Vabre site is not so easy to navigate with almost no real-time information available leading up to the start of the race yesterday in La Havre. Eventually we found the real-time tracking page by going to the Artemis Ocean Racing site and finding a link from there.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been critical of some of the teams competing in the Louis Vuitton Series. Websites have been flat and static with sign-up pages for press but not much to keep fans engaged. TEAMORIGIN have finally got themselves a Facebook page and have amassed 577 fans who can tune into news and video from the team. BMW ORACLE sidetracked any attention their sailors might have been getting in Nice by showing off their new wing this weekend, but the team has added a ‘Social Media’ page to their website, have been providing regular updates on the blog and facebook page and say that Twitter is coming soon! Emirates Team NZ’s site is pretty traditional – some news and some pics and Azzura has a big facebook following. Most of the Twitter traffic for the Louis Vuitton Trophy is automated media bots with a couple of journalists on the scene and a couple more tweeting from the web-feed.

In contrast to the corporate feel of the Louis Vuitton Trophy, some of the personalities racing in the Transat Jacques Vabre are shining through. While it was hard to work out what was going on from the official site, regular updates were being sent to the internet via Twitter from Dee Caffari, Alex Thomson, Mike Golding and OC Group CEO Mark Turner amongst others. Fans also responded, sending messages in real time.

While we seem to bang on about Twitter, there are more traditional audiences that can be brought along for the journey using other methods. Sam Davies, whose blog updates from the Vendee Globe were heartfelt and entertaining, is writing an online diary for the Telegraph, and already there is an engaging tone that speaks to both the experts and the more casual fans. Part of her update today says:

We will be using an enormous new spinnaker! It is a HUGE monster that nearly covers two tennis courts and measures 485msq in total. We need this surface area to pull Artemis along downwind as she is a bit of a heavy boat! For an idea – this sail is more than 100 m2 bigger than “Sophie” – my big spinnaker on Roxy (who is a lighter boat!). It is a bit daunting, but in training Sidney and I managed to deal with the hundreds of square metres of cloth – even when it is pretty windy!

Looking forward to putting it up in the race…. Actually, I guess I need to find a name for the sail too, in true tradition! Any suggestions welcome from Telegraph readers!

The Louis Vuitton Trophy runs until the 22nd. Perhaps, once the competition moves from the round robin to the finals, more interest will focus on the event which is supposed to rival the America’s Cup for glamour and prestige. meanwhile, we’ll be tracking exposure and coverage for both the Louis Vuitton Trophy and the TJV, both at an event level and a team level to see who is delivering for their sponsors!