Mountain Dew will title Clear Channel-NBC tour

Pepsi’s Mountain Dew brand, already as inexorably tied to action sports as any commercial entity this side of Burton Snowboards and Tony Hawk, is expanding its ties with a five-year title sponsorship of the Clear Channel-NBC pro skateboarding, BMX and freestyle motocross tour that begins next May.

Sources said the sponsorship was for four years plus an optional fifth at an average of $3.6 million a year, which would make it the biggest sponsorship contract and one of the biggest deals per se in the brief history of action sports.

Mountain Dew was an original sponsor of ESPN’s X Games a decade ago. Its action sports sponsorship portfolio includes a dozen athletes and ties to the Vans Triple Crown Tour.

Mountain Dew also has run its own grassroots action sports events for the last two years, the Free Flow Tour, which will now become the grassroots segment of NBC’s action sports tour.

Even before adding title rights for the NBC tour, Mountain Dew cast the biggest marketing shadow among action sports marketers, spending upward of $6 million a year on action sports events, marketing and media.

Considering the critical importance of the action sports audience to soda marketers, buying the title rights also allows Mountain Dew to keep competitors from infringing on the ties to action sports that it has carefully crafted over the last decade.

“This was a no-brainer from the start,” said John Galloway, who was Mountain Dew’s brand manager before assuming his current position as Pepsi’s director of sports marketing. “[NBC] used a great analogy, comparing this title sponsorship to the Nextel Cup Series. As a die-hard Nextel Cup fan, that hit me head-on. This is an unprecedented opportunity for us to help build a property from the ground up and get 100 percent name recognition for Mountain Dew.” Pepsi is a longtime sponsor of Jeff Gordon and titles a Nextel Cup race, as does Mountain Dew.

Larry Novenstern, senior vice president/director of national buying at Deutsch advertising, who cut Mountain Dew’s original X Games deal, said, “It’s a good move because it protects their existing action sports investments and extends their dominance in the category.”

Galloway was mum on details of the sponsorship package, but buying title rights to any programming on NBC Sports requires a minimum purchase of four spots per hour.

The five-city tour, conceived as a regular season for an alt-sports landscape now dominated by the X Games, will be supported by about 16 hours of predominantly live programming on NBC, with an additional 12 to 15 hours of programming on a yet-unnamed cable TV network (possibly USA Network, since NBC owns it after its recent merger with Vivendi Universal Entertainment).

Mountain Dew will also get print pages via a deal pending between the tour and TransWorld Media, the leading publisher of action sports magazines. Mountain Dew gets branded content in the form of vignettes and leaderboards within the programming, along with a massive on-site marketing presence and the ability to pass through marketing rights to Pepsi’s quick-service-restaurant and retail customers.

The individual leaders in event categories also will be competing for cash and trophies that will be called “The Dew Cup.”

Activation for the property will be handled by Fuse Integrated Sports Marketing, of Burlington, Vt., Mountain Dew’s longtime alt-sports agency.

For NBC and Clear Channel, the deal adds credibility.

“Mountain Dew has done as much, if not more, than any brand to grow action sports, and the marketing they can put behind this made it very attractive,” said Wade Martin, the tour’s GM.

NBC was asking about $2 million each for title sponsorship for the tour stops in May, June, August, September and October.