And there's Skandia Life Cowes week. Every premiership team is sponsored. Every concert is sponsored.

The boat show is moving with the times.

And we still own the family silver. The brand names and titles remain with NBS.

Before joining NBS as director of marketing, James Gower secured Barclays Mortgages sponsorship for the Ideal Home Exhibition and Mitsubishi for the Ski Show.

He says the benefits were enormous. Not only in access to the sponsor's client base, but in the sheer amount of money the sponsors spent in advertising their sponsorships.

Schroders is in the same position. In addition to its sponsorship fee, it will promote the show - using boating images - to the 300,000 individuals on its database.

The benefits to the show are enormous. Especially with the move to ExCeL coming up.

And what does Schroders get out of this?

The negotiations were handled by Capitalise, a specialist sponsorship firm. They have, said Gower, handled many heavyweight sporting deals in their time.

And, according to Gower, all Schroders gets is the right to align its name with the boat show.

They don't even get access to the NBS database.

Robert Braithwaite seems genuinely proud of the deal. Gower told me the amount Schroders is putting up "exceeds the money on the Ideal Home and Ski Show".

Sounds a good deal to me.