Jaguar and Team Sky win award

Jaguar and Team Sky win at the European Sponsorship Association Excellence Awards.

Innovation partners Jaguar and Team Sky have been recognised for creating and delivering an outstanding joint campaign at the European Sponsorship Association Excellence Awards, which recognises the best sponsorship work across Europe.

With the shared brand value of outstanding performance, and a commitment to innovating through development of new technologies, Jaguar and Team Sky became ‘innovation partners’ in 2014. Working together, the partnership objective is to enhance the team's performances by integrating design and engineering resources to develop new products for competition application.

Jaguar and Team Sky began working together in 2010. Since then Jaguar and Team Sky together have achieved widespread global media coverage, and engagement on social media, through some memorable marketing and PR ideas. With the relationship enhanced to ‘innovation partner’ status, and working also with Italian bike manufacturer Pinarello, Jaguar and Team Sky successfully collaborated to launch the award-winning Pinarello Dogma F8 bicycle in 2014. This bicycle achieved critical acclaim for its industry-leading engineering and racing credentials at the recent London Design Awards.

In another groundbreaking initiative, Team Sky’s Chris Froome became the first professional cyclist to ride through the Channel Tunnel. Jaguar's "Team Sky - Cycling under the Sea" stunt generated reams of press coverage and significant social media reach among cycling fans. The introduction of a bespoke F-TYPE Coupé as well as the XFR-S Sportbrake as support cars enhanced the impact of the high profile and unique campaign.

James Barclay, Senior Manager, Sponsorship & Brand Partnerships at Jaguar Land Rover said: "This is a huge accolade for Jaguar and reaffirms the excellent results achieved in our first year as Innovation partner to Team Sky. With a shared belief to push the boundaries, we look forward to executing industry-leading PR campaigns with Team Sky as we continue this successful collaboration throughout 2015."

Carsten Jeppesen, Team Sky Head of Technical Operations & Commercial said: "Our partnership with Jaguar is unique for the cycling industry. We utilised Jaguar’s high performance aerodynamics expertise to develop the Pinarello Dogma F8, which was essential to its success. Our  groundbreaking PR stunt involving Chris Froome’s ride through the Channel Tunnel has meant we have been able to bring cycling to new audiences. It has been a hugely successful technology and communications partnership."