Show, Don't Tell. How we got journalists on board

Catamarans flying across the water at over 100 km/h, a seasonal budget of 110 million euros, and Formula 1 legend Sebastian Vettel as co-owner—yet, in Germany, SailGP was virtually unknown.

This was the strategic challenge we took on at Schröder+Schömbs PR. It forced us to confront a question that defines modern media relations: How do you build intense curiosity for a sport audiences have never seen before? In a digital landscape where editorial space is strictly dictated by interaction rates, standard press releases no longer cut through. To establish the German SailGP team—led by double Olympic bronze medalist Erik Kosegarten-Heil—we knew we couldn't just explain the sport. We had to make the media experience it.

Instead of a traditional press conference, we engineered an immersive Media Experience on Hamburg’s Alster lake to bridge the gap between high-tech sport and storytelling.

We brought together journalists from top-tier print, digital, and news agencies for an exclusive half-day session with the athletes at the Norddeutsche Regatta Verein—the very club where Kosegarten-Heil trained for the Olympics. Abandoning scripts and formal stages, we orchestrated a hands-on sailing experience on J/70 sports boats, paired with informal onshore conversations and a barbecue. This raw, unscripted access allowed the media to connect directly with the human stories behind the league, highlighted by 21-year-old team strategist Anna Barth, who articulated the complexity of the sport with compelling clarity.

The strategy paid off, generating the exact type of deep-dive editorial coverage a growing sports league needs to capture a new market.

High-profile outlets like stern.de, dpa, and the Hamburger Abendblatt embedded with the team, with the Abendblatt publishing an extensive human-interest portrait of Kosegarten-Heil that contextualized the team's broader mission rather than just reporting scores. To drive digital engagement, we paired this narrative push with ticket giveaways for the upcoming home race in Sassnitz on Rügen, providing publishers with tangible community interaction. This campaign proves that successful modern PR relies on emotional, physical touchpoints; journalists who have felt the wind on the water write inherently different stories than those who simply read a briefing document.