How SailGP’s CMO is leveling up the racing league

This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here.

Growing up near Dublin Bay on the east coast of Ireland, Leah Davis was used to the sight of sailboats, but she never found herself at the helm.

Nowadays, though, she’s steering a ship—metaphorically speaking, that is. After stints as a competitive tennis player and coach, an ad agency account director, head marketer for the British Olympic Association, and founder of her own company, Davis is the CMO of SailGP, the international sailing competition co-founded in 2018 by Larry Ellison, where she’s working to grow the brand and its fandom coming out of a hot streak in its fourth season.

“Life’s short,” Davis said. “You’ve got to take those calculated risks, and I think for me, the excitement as to the potential of this role far outweighed any risks there. When I joined two years ago…we had this crazy vision: We wanted to be the most exciting racing on water…The next job to do is, ‘How do we educate people, and how do we scale awareness at a mass, global level?’”

GB to GP

While Davis was never a sailor herself, she did spend time as an athlete, playing tennis at the national level in Ireland and then coaching for a few summers in New York. In 2005, she moved on from the professional tennis world, earning her masters in marketing from the UCD Smurfit School of Business in Dublin.

Davis worked at agencies including Ogilvy until 2011, when she says she got a call from sports executive Hugh Chambers, who was at the time chief commercial officer of the British Olympic Association. He asked her to set up the marketing department for Team Great Britain ahead of the London Olympics—a “chance of a lifetime,” Davis told Marketing Brew. She accepted and spent about eight years as head of marketing for the association, solidifying her place in the sports industry.

Around a decade later, Davis was running her own consultancy when she got another career-changing call from a headhunter working with SailGP, she said. She joined in early 2023 as global marketing director, with SailGP “still in startup mode,” she recalled, and was promoted to CMO later that year.

“Coming-of-age”

Now, SailGP is in “scale-up mode,” Davis said. The organization, which saw social and broadcast growth during its first few seasons, has continued its growth into Season 4, according to its own metrics: Social media followers grew from 1.55 million at the end of Season 3 to more than 3.45 million in Season 4, with the fastest growth on TikTok. Its broadcast audience grew 48% year over year to 200 million in Season 4, during which more than 235,000 people also attended SailGP events.

“This year is a real coming-of-age,” she said. “We know when people come in and experience SailGP, whether that’s watching, attending, or following online, they’re hooked…So my real focus is, ‘how do I grow a top-of-funnel awareness about SailGP?’”

To do it, the league debuted a brand campaign late last year called “Unstoppable.” Also raising the league: brand partners like title sponsor Rolex, a broadcast deal with CBS Sports, which is set to air a record 54 hours of SailGP coverage in Season 5 that kicked off in November, and celebrity team owners, which include Issa Rae, former WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder, and former F1 driver Sebastian Vettel, Davis added.

Harvey Schiller, a longtime sports exec whose titles have included executive director of the US Olympic Committee, president of Turner Sports, and senior advisor to SailGP, chalks some of SailGP’s success up to Davis herself.

“She’s done a good job keeping the staff focused on their ability to market the organization as a whole,” Schiller said. “She’s not just a good leader, she’s a good person.”

Educate and entertain

Under her, SailGP has also worked to appeal to a broader sports audience through educational initiatives, like using AI-generated graphics to map out courses and explain the trajectories of the boats during broadcasts, as well as avoiding sailing jargon on social, said Davis, who counted herself as a sailing novice herself when she first joined the league.

Davis also believes that having some fun in marketing campaigns can capture the attention of potential new fans. During the F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix in November, for instance, SailGP ran an OOH campaign to target racing fans, noting that SailGP offers a similar racing product—except on water, she said.

“I feel like we’re in this really sweet spot where we can try these things,” Davis said. “We’re young, but we’re established. We don’t have huge pressures that maybe a more established league has…Let’s have fun, let’s be seen to be having fun, and let’s bring people on this exciting journey with us.”