Extreme Sailing Series Announce Land Rover as Partner
On the eve of our first Free sponsorship webinar, The Extreme Sailing Series has announced a major new sponsorship deal with Land Rover.
Mark Cameron, Land Rover’s Global Brand Experience Director, commented:
We are extremely excited to announce this new partnership with the Extreme Sailing Series. It is a natural fit for Land Rover and provides a perfect platform to showcase our shared core values. We identified the sport of sailing as an interesting target for us, and looked for the right property. The urban nature of the circuit, combined with these nonetheless off-road sailing machines, is a great fit. The Extreme 40s are high-performance multihulls able to race in nearly all weather conditions, whilst the Land Rover vehicles are able to tackle all terrains and conditions on land.”
We caught up with OC Sport Chairman Mark Turner to talk about the deal. He began by saying:
It’s an important step and it’s a great vote of confidence and a great brand. It’s global, premium and fits very well with the event and will help us develop the event.
What does it mean for the series in terms of what changes will be possible.
Part of what Land Rover get as part of this deal is to influence the markets that we go to. If we went everywhere the teams wanted us to go, there would be 25 events a year which is not feasible so. Land Rover’s goals are not that far away from ours, but it will change over time as we go to new venues. We need to match more of our markets over time to their key markets.
That list is not very different from the markets that someone like SAP would have or any global premium or B2B brand is going to come up with a similar list.
Part of the agreement is an activation budget which will help to co-promote the events. Having a consumer brand as a partner is great.
In time there may be some other activity, like grass-roots campaigns promoting ‘support acts’. In the big picture the having Land Rover on board will help us. There have been a few brands that we have been talking to that we haven’t quite got over the line, but now we can go back to them with a great message. Land Rover hasn’t been in the sport before in any meaningful way. They have decided that it was a good place for them to be. Then when they looked at sailing they decided that the Extreme Sailing Series was the place to be.
That will help us enormously with the partnerships that we need to find and equally, teams that are trying to raise money to compete will be able to use this as a reference. It’s a minimum of a three year commitment, so that is good for everyone.
How do you find sponsors. Do you idenify potential companies and approach them, or do you hear on the grapevine that someone is looking and get introduced.
Its a lot of different things. It’s hard to have a rule about how these things come together – you need to be doing all of those things. We’ve been around for a long time and one of our biggest selling points is reputation for delivering – even under some difficult circumstances we’ve never let anyone down.
As a result of that, we do have companies coming to us. It’s not a long list, but we do have firms coming to us regularly.
On the other side, we target sectors – either geographically or by kind of brand, but when you go that way around you need a bit of luck, because you need to be talking to a brand at the time when they are between sports or making a decision about the future. It’s a long game. You have to develop lots of relationships, you’ve got to stay in touch with a lot of people, but primarily, you have to have a product that people can believe in and rely on.
There are no sailors involved in Land Rover – anywhere. It’s like iShares when we created the Extreme Sailing Series, its a sports business deal and it has to work business-wise.
This deal has been in the process for a long time. What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome?
This has been process driven in a very rigorous way. It started off the back of research that Land Rover had done in terms of what sports they should be in on a global level. Sailing was one of them. They then realised that there were not that many options where there wasn’t an existing car brand or where they fitted.
They decided early that inshore and urban was the key for them.
One of the ongoing challenges will be to see how individual countries can use it.
You alluded to the fact that things have changed. Has the process changed because of the financial crisis or because people in the business of sponsorship have become more professional?
My sentiment is that there are still companies with a guy at the top who wants to do a certain thing, but there is a more rigorous process to evaluate the opportunities. There is more professionalism around it. I think agencies – advertising agencies now realise that sponsorship is fundamental to almost every brand in some way. It gets treated more seriously and the process is more serious and the measurement is more serious, so its more professional on both sides.
There is also a lot of fluidity with people working on both sides, switching from a brand to a property and back to an agency. There are more sports sponsorship professionals around, so generally the level of dialogue has developed enormously.
In Asia or South America, that’s different. The market is still relatively immature. So you still have a lot to do with what a single guy is thinking. But I think that’s one of the things holding it back (it will catch up quickly).
You said that this this deal would give confidence to the series and that it would have a flow-on effect. Do you think that will flow on to other parts of the sport?
I’m pretty sure that there are a whole bunch of sponsorship presentations which will mention Land Rover as a brand which is coming into the sport- yes. Its a positive thing.
I’ll be very happy if that credibility helps others in the sport. There is an element of critical mass. SAP is a very important partner and when you start connecting some of those brands together in the same place you start to get some momentum.
