28 Breeze Magazine
instead they have written it up in the most negative way,” said a Cup insider. “It is pretty infuriating, really.” The report, for example, outlines that government and Auckland City agencies invested $384.4 million in the event and suffered significant deficits, -$91.6m for Auckland and -$156.1m for the government. While it acknowledges that some of the city expenditure was for unrelated projects that were brought forward for completion in time for the Cup, it is left to a second report to underline the positive result of that. In its own separate review, Auckland Unlimited, a branch of Auckland City that promotes economic and cultural development, reveals that $92 million of the city’s expenditure was on already-planned works. Furthermore, bringing those infrastructure projects to early completion “will result in future savings of $67 million”. From the government side, the major factors negatively impacting the event were the closed borders due to Covid. New Zealand’s aggressive response to the Covid threat. The inescapable consequence of the hardline approach was that big income-generators – international fans, media, superyachts etc – were locked out.
The government turned a deaf ear to intense lobbying to allow the superyachts to treat their passages to Auckland as an effective form of self-isolation and quarantine; 110 superyachts were denied entry. The government also declined to sanction the Youth America’s Cup, which had attracted 19 entries from 13 countries and would have been an income-generator in its own right. Even with these set-backs, for the four months of Auckland’s America’s Cup summer, the city and the country enjoyed glorious international exposure. While most of the northern hemisphere was in the depths of a winter of Covid restriction and lockdown, the most-viewed America’s Cup of all time broadcast images of AC75s flying across the water against the backdrop of a city basking in the sunshine with tens of thousands of fans out and about enjoying the spectacle. According to America’s Cup Events Ltd (ACE), the global TV and live-streaming audience to 198 countries was just under 1 billion, 3.2 times the reach of the 35th America’s Cup in Bermuda in 2017. “Social media was a further area of strong growth across all the America’s Cup channels. Followers more than doubled from 491,000 to 1.09 million between the 35th and 36th
America’s Cups. Social media channels … delivered 499 million impressions during the racing period and totalled 715 million impressions over the entire 36th America’s Cup campaign.” The MBIE/Auckland City report took a very narrow view of the value of this exposure with a figure of $11 million. By contrast, a broadcast and media analysis by Nielsen came up with a Total Gross Media Value of $NZ1.4 billion. The QI adjusted figure, which compares exposure against classic forms of advertising, for AC36 (November 2020-March 2021) was $NZ354 million across all media. The strategy behind the city and government’s determinedly grim view of the 36th America’s Cup is hard to discern. It came after ETNZ rejected their $99 million offer for an Auckland defence regatta. The offer reportedly included event infrastructure and in-kind support, leaving only about a third as direct funds for the event. This has left open the possibility that the next AC regatta will be hosted at an offshore venue. A number of locations, including Ireland, Spain and Saudi Arabia are in the final mix. Perhaps the negative strategy is to show the Cup as an economic lemon, so taxpayers will not care if it goes offshore. Conversely, it could
