What's the Deal With That Yacht?

As the advertising industry meets in Cannes for the Lions, more than a few of us will sit around a table on the Croisette, look out at the horizon, and wonder: what's the deal with that yacht?

Fair question. The biggest one, the one you can't stop looking at, is probably the Koru: a $500 million sailing yacht with three masts taller than most of the buildings behind you. It travels with a $75 million support boat, which exists mostly to carry the toys.

So you do the thing every EP of HOP does at a table like this - you start running the numbers. How much would it take?

Not to buy it. To understand it — in the currency we know best. How many shoot days could we get for the cost of this boat?

A union shoot day runs about $400,000: a crew, a location, a few pages of dialogue. At that rate, the budget of that one boat is 1,250 shoot days. You could shoot every working day for five years and still not spend what it costs to park that thing in the harbor.

And that's just to own it. To float it — crew, fuel, insurance, a berth big enough to hold it — runs around $140,000 a day. That's a third of a production day, every single day, for a boat. 

Here's the part we keep coming back to: none of us own these boats. We can't think of a single client, colleague, or acquaintance who does. None of our peers ball that hard.

What our people do is take one of those days — one $400,000 — and make something out of it. The boat is 1,250 of those days, sitting at anchor, making nothing. We’d rather make something!

So if your feed this week is full of a kind of opulence that frankly feels alien: you're not alone, and you're not missing anything. The work we're all here to celebrate is the answer to how much would it take? It takes a day, a budget, and people who know what to do with both.

That, and one good week on the Croisette. No yacht required.