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- F1 champion Sebastian Vettel misses the point with Social Media
The motorsport world has gradually started to shake off the festive cobwebs as January continues to get the new calendar year underway with a number of high profile events taking place this week.
- Social Media and London 2012
We submitted a short blog for The UK Sports Network this week with some social media predictions for 2012. Being Olympics year, and with a number of athletes on the Sine Qua Non books, including Zac Purchase and Paralympic athletes Charlotte Henshaw and Ollie Hynd, we looked at how the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be the first true social media summer Games.
RT @InsideFerrari: Ferrari and Santander together until 2017 http://t.co/iGjflr3D #F1 #Sponsorship
Interesting to see how #London2012 sponsors use athletes - past and present - in activation and engagement #cisdcampbell
Why does the Dakar Rally not get the following its challenge deserves?
Unlike the Tour de France, which is also organised by ASO, the Dakar does not seem to capture the global imagination. There is not doubting that, while the physical challenge is not quite at the same level, it is none the less a huge endeavour and one which anyone even finishing the event can be rightly proud.
But Le Tour as the pinnacle of professional cycling has a massive TV and live audience and a roster of globally recognised sponsors, even with its past issues with performance enhancing drugs. Obviously the terrain of the Dakar makes the live audience unlikely. TV figures for the 2010 rally just run successfully again in Argentina and Chile, aren’t in yet but in 2009 ASO claimed almost 1000 hours of dedicated and 1130 hours of total coverage. This generated a cumulative audience of 2.2 billion people around the world – or more precisely the 189 countries where it was shown. Now that’s getting there.
Now we all know to take these sorts of TV figures with a pitch of salt but comparing these audience figures to other events why aren’t more businesses engaged? A quick review of globally recognisable names sees VW as the only major car manufacturer and Total as the only event partner. VW are backed by some big names including Red Bull, Castrol and EMC, but where are the others? Like Tour de France, surely the shear magnitude of the rally in terms of the numbers - distances, endurance, speeds, logistics etc. should spark the interest of both the audience and hence the businesses trying to get to that audience. The halo effect for a car, motorbike, engineering or technology company for doing well here must in some ways be almost as strong as the sanitised world of Formula 1.
We will be having a word with our good friend Toby Moody, the acclaimed motorsport commentator who also covers the Dakar, to see if he has any ideas on how this classic challenge event could and should raise its status.
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