Luca Birindelli, Chairman of the Challenger of Record Management (CORM), and Bruno Troublé, Director of Communications for the Louis Vuitton Cup, today jointly announced some important partnerships for the upcoming challenger selection series that starts on the 1st October 2003.
The announcements concern the Televison broadcast rights, the exclusive Internet partnership for the event’s official websites, along with the announcement of two Louis Vuitton Cup official sponsors, UBS and BMW.
Television Broadcast Rights
CORM, through its agent TWI, has secured more television coverage and revenue for the event than ever before. CORM and TWI have done this by creating synergy between the syndicate sponsors and the broadcasters thereby ensuring that the world’s blue riband sailing competition achieves the recognition and income that it is due.
The race programmes, with the help of CORM, will be seen across the world on TV channels such as the Outdoor Life Network (OLN) in the United States, the BBC in the United Kingdom, Viasat through Scandinavia, M6/Paris Premiere in France, RAI in Italy, TSR in Switzerland and StarESPN in Asia. In the United States OLN will not cover the America’s Cup Match as ESPN will take over. A number of pan-regional networks such as Eurosport, on a non-exclusive basis, will be showing event highlights on a delayed basis, further maximising the exposure for the benefit of the event and its participants.
This new and original approach to marketing the television rights for this unique event has proved to be a great success.
Official Internet Site
Based on the traffic volume and success of the last Louis Vuitton Cup official website, which received up to a million pages views a day at the end of the Louis Vuitton Cup Finals, producing and hosting a site such as this is a mammoth task.
CORM and Louis Vuitton and the America’s Cup organising authority AC2003 are delighted to announce a hosting and promotional partnership with Yahoo! the world’s biggest internet portal. The new sites, to be launched next week, (www.louisvuittoncup.yahoo.com) (www.americascup.yahoo.com) will likely see traffic volumes well in excess of what was experienced in 1999.
Using the promotional horsepower of Yahoo!’s homepages in its various different language sites, will make for yet further increased traffic to the sites.
Louis Vuitton in its role as manager of the Media Centre is responsible for all content of this official sites.
Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will not only host the Louis Vuitton Cup and America’s Cup websites, but will be responsible for marketing all advertising and promotional opportunities for the official site, providing sponsor companies with the ability to reach millions of Internet consumers on a global basis.
The official sites will be available in 3 languages, English, French and Italian.
Official Event Sponsors
CORM and Louis Vuitton are also pleased to announce the signing of two sponsorship deals, the first with UBS Financial Services Group, the leading global integrated investment services firm headquartered in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland. And the second with BMW the well known car manufacturer.
Over the past few years UBS has made a large commitment to competition sailing as it believes that the sport at this level has many natural synergies with its business and lends itself well to communicating UBS’s brand and business values to target audiences. Sailing, like finance, relies on teamwork, speed of reaction to changing circumstances, technology and strategy.
In August 2001, the bank sponsored the UBS Jubilee Race Around the Island, a re-enactment of the first ever America’s Cup in Cowes, UK in 1851.
The America’s Cup Jubilee was also the stage for the launch of the America’s Cup Legend by Louis Vuitton, a highly stylised and interactive display exhibition commemorating 150 years of America’s Cup heritage which is currently touring the world’s major cities. UBS is a partner of the exhibition.
Part of this ongoing commitment is also reflected in UBS’s partnership with the Alinghi Swiss Challenge, where UBS is a main sponsor.
BMW at the Cup
Innovative technology, design perfection and sporting excellence are all synonymous with the BMW brand whose origins trace back to 1916 with the founding of the ‘Bayerische Motoren Werke’. These three qualities are also closely associated with the America’s Cup’s long history, which itself reaches back as far as 1851. And all three qualities will be key measurements today in the success of the nine challengers and the Defender of the next America’s Cup.
BMW is proud to have tied its long heritage with that of the Louis Vuitton Cup – Challenger races for the America’s Cup. BMW is now intimately associated at the highest technological levels with the pinnacle of two key mechanised sports, Formula One, with the BMW Williams F1 Team, and the Louis Vuitton Cup, with the Oracle BMW Racing Team.
With these associations BMW has found a partnership that has the same values of leading edge technology, innovation and high standards of quality and professionalism. BMW’s involvement with the world’s greatest sailing event will also increase people’s awareness of sailing at a global level.
For further information please contact:
E:media-info@cupmediacentre.com