ZDO Blog
ZDO is helping ensure the world gets to watch women's sailing.
Every once in a while, an agency gets the chance of a lifetime. A chance to get involved in a dream project. To get involved with a client that pushes its capabilities and gives the agency a chance to perform at its peak and to show the client—and itself—what it’s made of.
ZDO had just such an opportunity.
A chance meeting at the America’s Cup Louis Vuitton Cup in Valencia Spain in May of 2007 between the CEO of the world’s most prestigious manufacturer of racing sails and one of the United States’ most able and successful female sailors ended in a commitment of the one to help the other revive the little-known Women’s International Match Racing Association (WIMRA) with the condition that she become its Executive Director. Both realized that WIMRA needed a brand identity—one that could carry the organization back into the international arena and show the world that it was a force to be reckoned with. The organization, which supported and sponsored women’s involvement in the match racing circuit on an international level also needed more members and the two agreed that it would be incredible if women’s match racing could become an event in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
The CEO recommended ZDO, a Sheboygan, Wisconsin-based marketing firm that specializes in image and brand development, to take on the project, and realizing that a vote of the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) about which events to recommend to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for inclusion in the 2012 games was taking place early October 2007, the work had to begin immediately. There wasn’t a minute to spare.
ZDO began what culminated in a three-month ad blitz in the top three sailing magazines in the world. A total of nine full-page-and-a-third ads were run in the three magazines that encouraged those in favor of adding women’s match racing as an event to the 2012 games to log onto wimra.org for a list of ISAF representatives and to encourage those representatives, via email, to vote in favor of adding the event at the upcoming meeting. The campaign met with huge success. Women’s match racing was included in the games, and one ISAF member was heard asking where “the 800-pound gorilla” had come from.
The ISAF vote even endured appeals by the men’s event that was taken out of the games in order to make room for women’s match racing.
If you’ve never seen or experienced a sailing regatta, I highly recommend them for their amazing displays of seamanship and athleticism, and most especially match racing, which is one boat pitted against another—two crews fighting head-to-head on a simple course, relying on their skills as sailors and on the wind and weather conditions, of which they have no control. Congratulations, ladies! And we wish the American team, especially, success in London in 2012!
Bryon D. Zimmerman, CEO
13.04.2009. 12:44
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