Unfurling the sails: SailGP readies itself for Season 4 and ever more ambitious plans

SailGP competitors race to the San Francisco finish line for Season 3 early in May 2023

SailGP is unfurling the sails on Season 4 this weekend with national teams in the mixed-gender championship battling it out on the open waves at 12 iconic venues around the world over 2023 and 2024.

The ambitious racing series is launching its biggest season ever opening with the United States Sail Grand Prix which will take place at Navy Pier, Chicago, on 16 to 17 June.

SailGP will be seen and heard by more fans this season – existing and yet to be converted – than ever before, with new broadcast deals recently announced plus a new fan engagement platform just launched.

More fans than ever before witnessed SailGP in Season 3, which recorded a total dedicated broadcast audience of more than 117 million, three times the league’s Season 2 audience. Over 800 hours of SailGP were broadcast globally, seen in more than 205 territories around the globe.

Truly ambitious plans

Speaking to SVG Europe, Melissa Lawton, SailGP’s chief content officer, says SailGP has truly ambitious plans. “It is one of the fastest growing sports properties out there right now and I think our incredible growth and broadcast numbers in Season 3 is testament to this.

“Season 4 will be our biggest season yet. We have added more venues (taking our events to 12), new teams (with the announcement of Germany joining our world class line-up which has also brought F1’s Sebastian Vettel to the league), and have an increased commitment from our global partnership, such as Rolex, Oracle and NEAR and the newly announced Mubadala.

“We have three key focus areas: product development, audience growth and commercial viability,” she continues. “All of which our broadcast product and content is at the centre of. We need to create ‘must watch’ content, increase our awareness – of which linear broadcast and digital audience growth are key – and finally, build a long-term sustainable business model.

“On the final point, our global partnerships are key, collaborating and delivering value for them and again, some of this is through creative content and story-telling and the innovative way we use broadcast to drive value, such as our innovative boundary graphics that are delivered through our patented LiveLineFX technology.

“Underpinning this is growing in a sustainable and responsible way and creating a blueprint that other leagues and organisations can follow. I believe SailGP is going to be a truly sustainable event, one that we’re proud to work on and say, “this is how you can do it,” to other leagues; this is the set up you need and these are the sorts of people who you need to make it happen. I think sustainability will just be a bigger and bigger focus for us from that perspective.”

Melissa Lawton, chief content officer at SailGP, on stage at SVG Europe’s Create, Share, Engage event in London in May

More broadcasters and fans

In the UK, SailGP has announced a free-to-air broadcast deal with ITV. Exclusive live coverage of nine event weekends will be shown on ITVX in the first standalone live sports commission for ITV’s streaming service, which was launched in late 2022. Additionally, all events in Season 4 of SailGP will be available across the ITV digital and linear network, including ITV1, ITV4 and ITVX.

Additionally, this week an exclusive partnership between Warner Bros. Discovery and SailGP has been announced, with full coverage of the Season 4 Championship coming live to ThreeNow in New Zealand.

Says Lawton: “We are focusing on the live product and making it the best it can be technologically and from a storytelling perspective. The live broadcast is always up there because we can see growth in that area. We want to make sure that anyone who’s tuning in is seeing something that’s interesting, something they’ll spend more time consuming and something they’ll want to tune into again at another time.”

The new SailGP fan engagement platform, called The Dock, is powered by Oracle Fusion Cloud CX. It will provide fans with exclusive offers, content and rewards. Designed as a loyalty platform, SailGP fans will be able to create a personalised account, access and engage with unique and exclusive SailGP content and in doing so, earn points that can be redeemed for exclusive rewards.

Lawton comments on how The Dock fits into the social content strategy: “The other one that’s a particular focus is scaling out our social content, making sure we understand what social channels are out there, who’s watching, where they’re watching, and what sort of content is appealing to them. But I guess a big one for us — and this is much longer term — is what is our storytelling role in the wider sports community? How do we tell those stories and what format do we use to get them in the zeitgeist? It’s not easy. You can’t just buy into a Drive to Survive philosophy and expect the same sort of results. We’ve got to think about how it is that we get to the audience through the content that we create ourselves.”

Watch SailGP chief content officer Melissa Lawton speaking at SVG Europe’s Create, Share, Engage event

She notes on the production that remote working is further enabling scale and flexibility for the series: “We’re also focused on remote production and scalability through remote production. When we look at people who are on site, we’re looking at them to pretty much document everything that’s happening, so we can recreate it into all the different assets that we need post event. For vertical video creation, we try to keep the people onsite locally and it doesn’t matter if they know the sport or not; what we’re trying to do is get them to shoot as much as possible, and then everything is sent back to our studios in London.

“We then have ‘editing banks’ of people who churn those into assets that we need to drive our social channels, long form content, or to add to the broadcast or news as well. We try to separate someone who’s a content capture who must be on site to do their jobs, and the other people who would be nice to be on site, but actually don’t need to be there. This is to reduce the amount of people on site, which also lowers our carbon footprint, and to increase the scalable output.”

Timeline TV is the remote production partner for SailGP while Riedel provides the set up and infrastructure for the local part of the production onsite

Overcoming challenges with tech

Lawton comments on the challenges for the racing series for Season 4, and generally as a still-new sport and entertainment platform: “The pressure to perform, to continually grow and show concrete outcomes [is a challenge]. It’s a crowded environment out there for sports broadcasting – there’s a lot of different outlets – so the competition for eyeballs is very difficult.

“There’s also the challenge of balancing where the content goes and what effort to put into which content,” she continues. “For us, it’s clear that live broadcasting is supremely important to the growth of the sport, but we also then have to balance that with what we are putting out on social media. What are we creating that’s unique and special for those who pay for the content? It’s just become a lot more complex than it ever was.”

Read more SailGP Season 4 to be broadcast free-to-air around the UK across the ITV network

Yet there are a lot of technologies out there today – and coming – that will help this racing series continue to grow. Lawton says: “There’s a lot of broadcasting technologies that we’re in a unique position to use and exploit for growth. 5G is one of them. Our CTO is looking into how 5G technologies can make a difference in us doing content capture from the boats.

“Also, the Oracle Cloud is getting faster, bigger. We’re learning how to use it, the capabilities and tools that are created to make it more streamlined. It’s all working in our favour at the moment, and we really couldn’t do a lot without that.”

Concludes Lawton on how she is helping to guide those goals through her role at SailGP: “In the end, I’m looking into the team and the wider league because I’m constantly asking for feedback on how we can do things better. And the number of responses when you ask for feedback from a wide group of people can really point you to going that 1% further or making a massive change.

“I really do look for a young and diverse team,” she adds. “I’m trying to allow them to have the flexibility and work in ways that suit them best while also looking at how we can improve scale and efficiency of workflows. But I think in general, I’m guiding these goals by looking how I can get the most out of all those processes, feedback, and use flexibility in different ways of working.”

Watch SailGP unfurl the sails on Season 4 this weekend at the United States Sail Grand Prix which will take place at Navy Pier, Chicago, on 16 to 17 June