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April 2, 2019

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April 3, 2019

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There’s no doubt that the MyState Australian Wooden Boat Festival is very photogenic – how could it not be, with around 500 beautiful wooden boats on display – but it’s also full of stories, characters and amazing tales of adventure. No surprise, then, that the world’s media loves to talk about it. And they do, extending the reach of a community-produced free festival held on a remote island in a regional capital city in Australia’s smallest state, to span the world. Whether it’s in the wealthy yacht clubs of New England or the rough-and-tumble boat yards of the Pacific Northwest, the member’s lounge at the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes or the historic Batavia Shipyard in the Netherlands, they’ve all heard of the Australian Wooden Boat Festival and increasingly, they are coming to see it.

“When we started hearing about the Australian Wooden Boat Festival, it kind of came as a surprise, especially when we heard that it was one of the largest festivals in the world for wooden boats. So we started looking into it. Where was it in Australia? It was in Tasmania. Well…where’s Tasmania? (and) how could a huge wooden boat festival be in such a remote location?”

Steve Stone, Off Center Harbor, USA

Tasmania’s Warm Embrace- https://vimeo.com/149199019

As a volunteer-run, free, ticketless event, we don’t have the kind of budget that allows us to plan world-wide media campaigns and hire expensive advertising agencies to spread the word. But we do have the stories, and thanks to a talented corps of volunteer and professional AWBF photographers, we have the pictures to go with those stories. If your magazine is all about high-end craftsmanship in wood, how can you resist a feature on the kind of traditional skills you can see practiced every day in the Shipwright’s Village at the MyState Bank Australian Wooden Boat Festival. If you are into design, we can tell you about the Intentional Wooden Boat Symposium, presented at the festival by the Australian National Maritime Museum – and supply the pictures to go with the story. Like tales of adventure? We’ll introduce you to the people who lived them and wrote about them. (Oh, and pictures, too!)

That’s one way we can tell the AWBF story with a minimum of paid advertising. That’s a good thing, when our media monitoring company, Meltwater, tells us that the advertising value of the media coverage we received for the 2019 festival has already topped $3 million. That’s $3 million we certainly couldn’t raise if we had to pay for it. But if the story is a good one, and we can supply details and pictures, the media will cover it. We make sure that we look after our journalists and bloggers and film makers, with a dedicated Media Centre on the festival site and accredited access to boats to capture all the action on the water and ashore.

“For the period from 4 March 2017 to 4 March 2019, 648 articles appeared in online media throughout Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Netherlands, Turkey, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines as well as numerous stories from bloggers from locations we couldn’t identify.”

– AWBF Media Manager Bob Batchpole

Here’s a recent sample from the UK magazine Classic Sailor:

Classic Sailor (UK) 22 Feb

We acknowledge and thank the following publications for coverage in their print and on-line media:

Classic Sailor Magazine (UK) – classicsailor.com

AWISA The Magazine – www.awisa.com

MySailing.com – www.mysailing.com.au

Australian Wood Review – www.woodreview.com.au

The Mercury and Tas Weekend Magazine – www.themercury.com.au

The Herald Sun – www.heraldsun.com.au

Afloat Magazine – www.afloat.com.au

Boat Gold Coast – boatgoldcoast.com.au

The Telegraph – www.dailytelegraph.com.au