WORK

Our journey with SailGP was quite the ride! From winning the pitch in 2021 to be their New Zealand creative and media partner, to holding tight for a couple of years while Covid played havoc with the schedule, to the eventual sell-out and huge success event. We are so proud and grateful of the opportunity to work with both SailGP’s global and New Zealand operations. It was a thrill to be able to influence so many elements, including media planning and producing assets for marketing and signage.

Our original pitch idea, “Seeing is believing”, was formed off audience survey insights that found a general perception that competitive sailing was elitist, inaccessible, and not a ‘real sport’. But we knew that to be untrue. SailGP is fast-paced, close-to-shore action with a party atmosphere to boot. So our pitch concept addressed this head-on with the idea that “it’s sailing, but not as you’ve ever seen it. In fact, it has to be seen to be believed!” It was a thrill to be able to influence so many elements, including media planning and producing assets for marketing and signage.

But when the global Covid-19 pandemic delayed the event, we created a commercial hype sponsorship video for SailGP to attract and gauge businesses' appetite for action as we waited for the next year to roll around. It had to convey brand values, the excitement of the sport and the interest the event generates.

We partnered with SailGP to create and launch the campaign for ticket sales - which sold out within hours. Our marketing concept had to educate people on what SailGP was and why it was different; this included an opportunity to tell more of the SailGP brand story and cement it as a sport of the future through their purpose-driven sustainability efforts. The ‘Action wherever you look’ idea was able to show the party action and racing action, as well as having the potential to also talk to their environmentalism.

To position the New Zealand Sail Grand Prix as world-class and the event of the summer, we designed SailGP’s Friends in Swell Places brand identity to target affluent urban 30-somethings and make them view SailGP as hot entertainment property and a luxury day out. To truly become iconic and transcend the category, we deliberately broke away from the core SailGP vibe to bring forward the more glamourous party side of the event.

We were also responsible for the team base design. The NZL SailGP team is made up of ground crew, event organisers, engineers and the athletes. The team base is their home away from home when racing is in full swing. They wanted theirs to be a calming, inspiring place that was uniquely Kiwi to create a connection to home. In classic Kiwi style, the NZL team are quiet in their confidence, so we created a base that is simple and sophisticated, light and uplifting, with reminders of their purpose and passion - Live Ocean. The base has a multitude of purposes: hosting meetings and team partners, on-shore crew offices, it’s where the athletes prepare. We also had to consider how the boat fit into the space.

We went even further with helmet and hull graphics. Debuting at the Christchurch race, our helmet design for the NZL team better represents them as a whole; inspired by a racing spirit, ocean health, and their roots in Aotearoa. Other considerations included safety requirements, logo placement, and how it complemented the teams’ uniform.

And when lightning damaged the NZL boat and took it out of action, we whipped up some hull graphics by reversing out the colourways to go on the stand-in white boat.

We wrapped up with the SailGP Technologies launch video. SailGP Technologies is a sub-brand that partners with the world’s best high-performance companies to develop new technologies from sustainable means and processes. This new name was part of a major repositioning of the brand and business from a homegrown company punching above its weight with record-breaking innovations to a world-class hub of technology with global scale. We developed a video concept to launch this new brand. We used an edgy and sophisticated look and feel with high production values and a visionary tone of voice to make the audience believe SailGP Technologies can help them change the world.