Sunseeker International
Maximising a moment at the Cannes Yachting Festival PR / Media Relations
The brief
Create a launch moment worthy of a new era
Sunseeker arrived at the Cannes Yachting Festival 2025 with something significant to say.
The international debut of the Sunseeker 134 Superyacht marked a step up in scale, ambition and audience.
The challenge with launching anything at Cannes is that the festival is saturated with competitors also launching their newest, sleekest, most cutting-edge models. This means that attention is fragmented.
We therefore focused on being strategic with our timing, leveraging our relationships, and crafting a more compelling launch narrative than our competitors to maximise our opportunities for coverage. With this in mind, the brief was to create a press moment that cut through, elevated perception, and drove meaningful global coverage.
The challenge
Standing out in a sea of sameness
At the Cannes Yachting Festival, every brand brings something new to the party. Every yacht is better, more refined, and more advanced than its last. For every brand in attendance, the risk is balancing the investment in attendance and the need to stand out to drive as much interest among customers as possible.
MTM’s challenge was to fully capitalise on the opportunity the show presented, and to bring Sunseeker’s presence up a level from previous years. For the press event, we focused on establishing solid attendance, executive visibility and ensuring the overall experience reflected the premium nature of the brand. The strategy needed to focus as much on perception as on communications.
To succeed, we needed to:
- Reframe the launch as more than a product reveal
- Create a narrative that journalists wanted to engage with
- Deliver a seamless, high-end experience that matched the brand’s ambition
The solution
Elevating a press conference into an experience
We treated the press conference as a creative endeavour, prioritising the creative and storytelling objectives over the logistical considerations.
At Cannes, press calls are constant. Journalists move quickly, attention is fragmented, and most announcements blur into one another. So, the challenge was to create a moment that felt considered, distinctive and worth stopping for.
Creating a story with gravity
Rather than a traditional specifications-focused yacht launch, the narrative we built was around transformation. It was the start of a new creative chapter for Sunseeker, where British engineering meets design leadership.
Choreographing a press moment
We anchored a high-impact press conference within Sunseeker’s Cannes footprint, transforming a functional presence into a focal point for media attention.
Every detail was considered, from precise and targeted invitations to the right journalists, to clear, confident messaging that cut through technical noise.
It was also a creative choice to facilitate a calm, controlled environment that reflected the brand’s premium positioning. This allowed the story to cut through without distraction. Cannes is visually and physically noisy. Multiple launches compete for attention at any given moment. Our response was to create contrast.
Messaging was stripped back and disciplined, ensuring that the key idea, scale and creative evolution, landed cleanly. In a setting defined by excess, restraint became a creative decision.
Elevating access and immediacy
We designed the experience to continue beyond the conference itself, extending the media engagement beyond a single touchpoint.
We built in immediate access to Sunseeker’s leadership. Interviews were scheduled to follow seamlessly, allowing journalists to deepen the story while it was still fresh. This turned a passive announcement into an active content-generation moment, which increased both the volume and quality of coverage.
Creativity extended into how the story was sustained. We anticipated what media would need to publish quickly and removed every barrier. High-quality imagery, quotes and technical detail were prepared in advance and distributed rapidly, enabling journalists to move from attendance to coverage swiftly. This carried the momentum well beyond the event.
Results
Testimonial
“I just wanted to congratulate you and thank you for helping us deliver a seamless and super well-attended press conference in Cannes. The feedback from everyone was that it was the best one we’ve hosted in years, very professional, calm and well attended.”
Francesca Holt, Senior Marketing Executive at Sunseeker