Keep it simple, make it direct- Jon Bramley
October 16, 2012
From the off, I wanted to create a “content factory” of experienced, hard-working journalists, photographers, broadcasters and PR professionals with one over-riding objective: to be ‘great to work with’.
That meant returning calls on the day we received them from the media, replying to e-mails within a similar timeframe, and actually trying to help newspaper and TV station reporters find the information they were seeking.
Further, the team was charged with producing material directly for the outlets we were targeting. That meant following their style to the letter, even down to ensuring dateline format was followed.
We targeted the big global agencies – Reuters, AP and AFP – the national news agencies, the biggest television and radio news distribution companies and a hit-list of the kind of large audience publications which could seriously grow our audience.
In a nutshell (and pardon the pun), we wanted to take sailing out of the backwaters and into the mainstream.
We cared very much about our own platforms such as our website and Facebook pages and took big steps to improve them but the overall target was to persuade the biggest sports publications to start reporting on us again, something that hadn’t properly happened since it was known as the Whitbread Round the World Race 30 years ago.
We offered our “target list” exclusive material, we helped them with their travel and accommodation costs for an event that stops off in 10 countries around the world, and we gave them “oven-ready” content that took minimal work for them to use.
The result, as shown in our Race Report that is due for release shortly, was a media record-breaker for our 39-year-old event.
Here are the highlights:
• 1.55 billion cumulative TV audience from 8,969 broadcasts
• 41% increase in cumulative print readership
• 94% increase in online news articles
• Doubling of radio audience
Not surprisingly, our success in increasing our mainstream media pick-up translated to much improved figures for our own platforms with the website showing a 120%+ rise in page views and our Facebook fans soaring from around 50k pre-Race to 207k at the end of it.
There is still much, much more work to do and we are currently refining our strategy for the 2014-15 edition to ensure more and more of those high-end, big audience mainstream media platforms report the race consistently going forward.
At its core, though, our approach will remain the same: keep it simple, keep it direct and above all, be GREAT to work with.
Jon Bramley is the Director of Communications for the Volvo Ocean Race, off-shore sailing’s leading professional event and the longest in pro sport. It is held once every three years and covers nearly nine months, 39,270 nautical miles and five continents. Jon took over the role in May last year after a 29-year career in sports journalism. He worked for 10 years in senior roles at the Press Association, was Assistant Sports Editor at the Sunday Mirror and then worked for 11 years at Reuters. His roles there included running the sports news desk, covering five Olympics and three soccer World Cups. He also headed the Reuters United Kingdom and Ireland general news bureau for a year.
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