Volvo Ocean Race: Overview, Marketing, History

programme coverage and news. With two stopovers in the United States, the
cumulative audience figure of 79,609,098 was dominated by news coverage,
338 reports adding up to 10 hours watched by a cumulative audience of
72,080,918, but the bulk of this was attained when the fleet was in that country.
Dedicated programmes reached an audience of 6,975,780 during an hour-long
programme scheduled for nationwide screening.
Sweden enjoyed great success with its dedicated programming. The time slot
for this moved from 22.30 on a Friday night to 19.30 and the programme
achieved a cumulative audience of 43,552,300 (including the repeat). This
compared with 100 news reports in the same country, seen by a cumulative
audience of 28, 036,000.
PRINTED MEDIA
Although not all territories were monitored, 15,264 cuttings were accumulated
from publications with a cumulative circulation of 246,554,434 reaching a
readership of 686 million unique readers.
Germany was the highest scoring territory, accounting for 29% of the cuttings
gathered, followed by Sweden with 18% and the UK with 16%, though UK
newspapers accounted for four of the top six publications in terms of numbers
of articles.
The Volvo Ocean Race featured in 1,526 headlines and the winning syndicate,
illbruck, featured in 1,801 headlines. As with television, a strong news element
gave rise to peak interest. The Sydney to Hobart race alone accounted for 17%
of the cuttings monitored. The number of cuttings rose markedly in each of the
countries where and when stopovers took place.
But there was strong coverage around the world in the major print media and
the cumulative circulation of publications featuring the Volvo Ocean Race was,
as mentioned, 246,554,434 with a total readership of 686 million.
The ability to download free of charge pictures from the Volvo Ocean Race online
archive was exercised by just over 1,500 picture desks, enhancing exposure
in newspapers, magazines and other websites. In addition, the race
organisation had an agreement with Reuters to distribute the images to over
MEDIA STATISTICS 19