Trying to stand out in the crowd is one of the most difficult things to do during the Monaco Yacht Show. Everywhere your eyeballs go, there’s someone trying to tell you something, the noise is constant and the colour pallet is varied. It’s hard to quantify the investment, but as a rough estimate you’d expect several million euros to have been spent on the marketing efforts during the Show. That includes collateral, brand activations, social media and video teams, uniforms, flags, parties, VIP hospitality, brochures, books, hats (lots of hats), lanyards and a myriad of screens showing corporate mini-movies and sponsorships and partnerships galore. And this does not include the stands themselves, the superyachts in the harbour and the various pre-show and during the show marketing activations.

There were a variety of rebrands and it was clear that some companies had boosted their budget to make a bigger impact than their rivals. What was most interesting was the fact that many companies were on a rinse and repeat mode: “don’t fix it if it isn’t broke” strategy, same place, same faces and same look and feel, using the same collateral and stand construction on a three-year cycle.

Now it’s all about the follow-up, the measurement and the ROI … did we see all our best clients, did we meet many new clients and what is the real potential of this vast investment during four days in Monaco? The sales team will be sifting through opportunities and the marketing team will be feeling relieved it’s all over, hoping that all the leads and pipelines are fed into the CRM accurately. Then they will all wake up and realise that Fort Lauderdale and METSTRADE are only a few weeks away.

Anyway, having observed the brand overload and the myriad marketing messages, team selfies, mini-movies about the people behind the brand, the new coffee-table books and magazines, the various brand partnerships, the copious amounts of alcohol activations and plenty of giveaways and merch, we all have to do again in 360 days’ time.

So it now makes sense to launch and bring back to the market – in six months’ time, six months before the Monaco Yacht Show 2026 – our unique, dynamic and much-loved marketing event, Make Your Mark. Today we are launching the next edition of Make Your Mark, taking place in March 2026 in the cool and unique city of Amsterdam, with a programme exclusively made up of marketing and branding experts from outside the superyacht space, designed to inspire and drive innovation into the marketing minds who want to stand out of the crowd and be seen by new customers, not just their existing ones.

We’re really excited to create and rebuild this event after a Covid-induced absence and we look forward to welcoming an exclusive list of just 200 marketing minds to spend two days analysing, brainstorming and re-thinking the way our industry tell stories and engages beyond our ecosystem.

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