How the America’s Cup World Series got its online marketing right
Working in an office next to the Team Origin base means I’ve seen more than my fair share of marketing material for the America’s Cup World Series event here in Portsmouth. Whether it’s posters featuring the Duchess of Cambridge, stickers on the floor tracing walking routes around Portsmouth waterfront or flyers through my front door advertising 80s sensation Wet Wet Wet playing a concert last Saturday night, the event has been pretty hard to miss.
The America's Cup World Series Portsmouth took place at the weekend.
Yet, for all the in-your-face physical marketing efforts, the digital approach has been slightly more subdued. Anyone with even a passing interest in the event won’t have been followed around by remarketing ad nauseam, or found their email inboxes cluttered with message upon message upon message.
That’s not to say the event hasn’t been effectively marketed online, though. Instead it stands as a clear indication of how to promote an event without making people sick of the sight of it before a ball has been kicked, a cue chalked or – in this case – a wing sailed catamaran taken to the water.
Great content
Both the America’s Cup and America’s Cup World Series Portsmouth websites are chock full of great content, displayed in an easily navigable fashion. Both feature comprehensive guides to what each stage involves – great for those who are planning to attend but don’t know a great deal about the event or sailing in general (which, let’s face it, is most of us).
It seems this is an approach being rolled out across the entire weekend, not just for website content. Team Origin CEO Sir Keith Mills said the event has “been designed to be very easy to consume for non-sailors. You don’t need to know anything about sailing; you can watch it on television or watch on the shore, and understand exactly what’s going on.”
The ACWS Portsmouth site has a detailed itinerary of the other events taking place over the weekend – such as a Red Arrows display and Proms concert – along with times and locations.
It’s safe to say that anyone asking the organising team for any extra information hasn’t looked quite hard enough on site.
An informative social presence
To its credit, the America’s Cup has succeeded on Twitter where countless others have failed: staying informative. How many times have you followed the account of an upcoming event only to unfollow it again pretty much straight afterwards, having seen your news feed explode with interminable praise retweets? We don’t need to see just how excited every single attendee is about the weekend ahead, and we certainly don’t need to filter through page after page of self-promotional guff to reach the information we actually need.
This is why the @acwspmth account has been such a success, managing to offer engaging content that amounts to more than “Buzzing for the America’s Cup!! xoxo”. That’s partly why the account has amassed more than 3,600 followers in the eight months since it was created. The @americascup account, meanwhile, boasts 76.8k followers, although it was set up back in May 2010.
The ‘ACWSPortsmouth’ hashtag has been included in 301 original tweets and 1,174 retweets to date. Its reach is more than 2 million accounts, with timeline deliveries above 4.5 million. Meanwhile, Oracle, Mark Fox and Ticketmaster UK have all got on board with the hashtag, sending it out to their 650,000 collected followers. Other recognisable names who have also engaged with it include Sir Ben Ainslie and Olympic gold medallist Lizzy Yarnold.
It’s even more informative over on Facebook, where posts cover everything from travel updates to TV coverage for those not able to make the live event.
The success of this maiden event is yet to be fully measured, but the fact that 200,000 people were estimated to visit Portsmouth at the weekend should illustrate that marketing can be successful without pestering people into submission. Failing that, you could just rope in the services of Wet Wet Wet.
Dai Howells is content delivery manager at digital marketing agency Vertical Leap.
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