Pilote Media is in the process of relaunching the popular yacht racing business website – yachtsponsorship.com as yachtracing.biz. The rebranding is designed to make people aware of the wide variety of business stories covered by the site for an audience interested in the business of the sport of sailing and yacht racing as well as a wider sports marketing audience.
Since 2008, yachtsponsorship.com has mixed news with comment, focussing on the commercial elements of competitive sailing. The ‘blog’ began as a way of communicating best practise to rights-holders, event organisers and sailors looking for sponsorship in a tough economic climate.
But the site has grown into a recognised source of information for a wide variety of decision makers involved with the sport’s top events including the America’s Cup, Volvo Ocean Race, Extreme Sailing Series and World Match Racing Tour.
David Fuller, who founded yachtsponsorship.com explained the reasons for changing the name of the site.
There comes a time when a brand has to make a decision – whether to proceed with a legacy brand that has some recognition, even if that brand may be limiting, or to become something that is more representative and scalable for the future. I think that yachtracing.biz is one of those brands that does what it says on the tin. We will continue to be the first choice for information about the commercial aspects of the sport of yacht racing and sailing, but we have some plans for expansion too.
YachtRacing.biz allows brands to follow specific sectors more easily, via RSS and other syndication methods. Competitive sectors like sailing clothing and apparel or destination marketing, can now find the news most relevant to them.
David says that the philosphy of the site won’t change too much, but new opportunities, including events are being investigated.
We take the view that our readers know the news. They have a good handle on what is going on in their part of the industry, so we have two roles: one is to give them visibility of news that helps give more sense of the bigger picture and the second is to add our own brand of insight – interpreting what the news means.
YachtRacing.biz will also feature stories that are relevant to the business audience that are not specifically yacht racing related. A new lifestyle section will run in parallel to the business site. David says that this will not dilute the core purpose of the site.
We get a lot of press-releases and news stories that don’t make sense to run in our main business feed. However there are some stories that we think would be of interest to our audience. This is quite common for business publications to do – take a look at the Economist’s Intelligent Life or the FT’s ‘How to Spend It’ magazine. The reason that brands like Louis Vuitton, CAMPER, Foncia, Emirates Airlines, Audi and Volvo sponsor sailing is to reach a certain kind of audience. We talk to that audience on a regular basis.
YachtRacing.Biz is available on all the usual formats including:
- YachtRacing.Biz RSS Feed (f0r Google Reader etc)
- Yachtracing.Biz Email Subscription
- YachtRacing.Biz Twitter
- YachtRaving.Biz Facebook
