Editor's note: This story is revised from the print edition.
The action sports world is at a critical point, say many of its executives. It’s large enough to attract more corporate attention; mature enough for its capitalists to coexist with, or even win over, its antiestablishment types; and smart enough to recognize its shortcomings and remedy them. But this has to start happening now, they say.
“We’ve been riding this wave of action as a great vehicle to build a brand, but now we’ve got to turn the
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| Showing events such as the X Games (above) live is seen as one key to raising the sport’s awareness among consumers and sponsors. |
corner and make it about driving sales and building [a] brand,” said Bill Carter, president of Fuse Interactive Sports Marketing, a top consultancy in action sports. “Because in another five years, some sponsors will say, ‘I gotta pay attention to my bottom line, and this isn’t cutting it.’”
Where events are concerned, many experts say action sports has to embrace the formats that help make stick-and-ball sports so popular: put competition front-and-center, play up “seasons” and standings and rivalries, and depend less on lifestyle elements like music, videos and electronic gadgetry to make events compelling.
“We all have to grow and mature,” said Steve Astephen, CEO of The Familie, the top action sports athlete-representation agency. “In the end, if we’re going to be a circus act, we should just go jump on Lollapalooza.” Touring rock festival Lollapalooza folded two days after Astephen’s comment.
Where television is concerned, action sports not only has to be more compelling — it has to be live. ESPN will televise its X Games live this summer, with tie-ins to “SportsCenter.” The Dew Action Sports Tour (an NBC-Clear Channel collaboration), will air live next summer, when it launches.
“Every major sporting event is done live, whether it’s the big perceived sporting events like the Super Bowl, or just regular-season NBA, MLB or college basketball,” said Ron Semiao, X Games founder and senior vice president of ESPN Original Entertainment. “It’s ingrained in the minds of the public: If it’s important, it’s televised live.”
These executives feel some urgency, because participation in action sports — and sales of equipment — has outpaced the property and television side of the business since day one, a situation that is becoming ingrained. Roughly one-third of all sporting goods sold in the United States last year, or more than $14 billion, was action sports-related, according to American Sports Data. Yet the top 20 sponsors spent only $80 million last year, according to a study commissioned by NBC Sports, roughly what PGA Tour events net in two months.
With skateboarding, snowboarding and motocross the three fastest-growing sports in the country in recent years, and with five action athletes among the 48 athletes most popular with teens, according to Teen Research Limited, the raw material is present for an advertising and sponsorship boom. But there are barriers.
Equipment and apparel makers don’t support action event properties and telecasts the way manufacturers do in golf, preferring to sponsor athletes, most of whom don’t actually compete in televised events.
Traditional consumer brands are hesitant to spend heavily
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| The industry is looking to be more intelligent and imaginative in its dealings with sponsors. |
in action sports, because the TV audience isn’t huge and because the landscape isn’t entirely hospitable, with events that aren’t as sponsorship-ready as those of the NASCARs and the NFLs of the world, and with a youth audience that’s perceived as skeptical and anticorporate.
Action sports’ “properties” — events and athletes — aren’t fully evolved as marketing vehicles yet. Only this year did the top TV property, the X Games, go to a largely live television format. And there are no players associations for sponsors to approach for convenient group marketing rights — although early steps are now being taken.
It’s a wild world, but one with potential to connect with the teenage audience that traditional sports find increasingly hard to reach.
Here, according to industry veterans, are four areas in which the action sports world must mature if it’s going to reach its potential.
1. Improved event structure and more compelling TV programming
There has to be a clearer, overarching event structure that embraces the concept of seasonlong competition and incorporates a range of events, to both sustain interest and exploit the strengths and personalities of individual events. “I think the [structured, five-event Dew Action Sports Tour] is absolutely a good thing,” said the X Games’ Semiao.
Ostensibly, the X Games and the Dew Tour are rivals. The X Games nets 35 to 40 percent of the action sports TV sponsorship pie each year, and Mountain Dew — newly signed to title the NBC-Clear Channel tour — is just one of the sponsors that will have been wooed by both properties — and by Vans Triple Crown, the Gravity Games and others.
But Semiao agrees with the Dew Tour’s PGA Tour-style model, in which respected events like the X Games are either sanctioned by the tour or have a symbiotic, if unofficial, relationship.
“The Masters is good for the PGA Tour and the tour is good for the Masters,” said Semiao. “What is not a good thing is when you have organizers unilaterally calling their event the world championships when it’s not recognized as such. There’s no barrier to entry in the action sports world.”
And there’s not much in the agate section of the sports page, either, where avid young sports fans have always spent time and where action sports could win converts.
“Supercross has a leaderboard,” said Astephen. “We need that in skate and BMX. [The Dew Tour] will give kids something to follow. If it’s just a once-a-year thing, wouldn’t you rather go out and skate with your friends?”
Added Wade Martin, general manager of the Dew Tour: “Everyone has seen the guy on the vert ramp. It can’t survive on novelty any longer. It’s about driving home a context to what you are watching and seeing and reading about.”
Other executives feel action sports gets an unfair rap. The World Cup Skateboarding organization has been a sanctioning and scoring body for skateboarding for two decades, and its rankings, based on a worldwide schedule of events, help determine who skates in the X Games. “It bothers me to hear ‘[skateboarding] is fragmented and disorganized,’ when people really haven’t done any research,” said Danielle Bostick, WCS director. “The blame is on events we do that don’t let anyone know we’re there. I love the X Games, but they know I’m vocal about this.”
Will a new context for old sports be enough? Some don’t think so. Rick Arnstein, general manager of GMR Marketing, which handles Nokia’s involvement in the Ramps and Amps tour, says the industry should hustle to uncover and promote new sports, such as freeboarding, in which athletes are pulled on a surfboard behind a boat.
“When you think about the companies that have invested to be on the edge of action and extreme sports, there hasn’t been a lot of new news,” Arnstein said. “It’s like alternative rock radio, because the minute you [promote yourself as] ‘alternative,’ [you’ve become] a mainstream radio station. Most of the companies I’ve talked to and have heard from think [action sports are] overly mature and no longer innovative or providing the edgy messaging or platform that they originally invested in it for.”
The Dew Tour will do some of what Arnstein advocates, with a distinct exhibition sport at each of its five events next summer. X Games executives say they have finally developed a street skate course that combines authenticity and excitement for August’s Summer X Games. The proof will be in the ratings.
2. Bolder sponsors, smarter properties, better execution all around
Everyone involved in sponsorship must be more intelligent and more imaginative.
“People say companies are after the youth market but don’t want anything to do with action sports,” said the X Games’ Semiao. “But of course they do. The onus is on the properties.”
OK, but how? Suggests the Dew Tour’s Martin: “We have to create our marketing strategies and tactics not just for the purpose of driving the tour front of mind but driving our partners’ objectives as well. If we’re creating a radio promotion, it’s hand-in-hand with how we create a national sweepstakes for our partners to participate in.”
Is the sponsorship community fully aware of the opportunities in action sports, then? “Corporate sponsors need to be smarter about it,” said Jen Van Dijk, a vice president at IMG Consulting who focuses on youth marketing. “The industry is the industry; it will deliver a great product. There’s a perception the properties side is fragmented, but a smart marketing model will hold up no matter what. With all due respect, the people who make these decisions are in their 30s and 40s, and [action] is a bit of foreign territory to them.”
So corporate America is reluctant to plunge into action sports, and endemic sponsors, those who make their living almost solely from action sports and who spend far more in the space than non-endemics, are hesitant to spend on bigger, televised, mainstream events. Is there a joint solution?
“I think you’ll see more of the endemic/non-endemic collaboration
in the next six to eight months, based on conversations I’ve had,” said C.J. Olivares, vice president, programming and marketing, of Fuel, Fox’s 24/7 action sports network. “You’re going to see an action sports presence at back-to-school time with a major fast-food chain and a major packaged-goods company, each working with endemics. It’s happened before, but on a small scale, like a Quiksilver-branded phone with Boost Mobile.”
What do endemics have to lose by resisting joining the mainstream? “A lot of the people of the generation running the endemic companies grew up in a time when [the corporate mainstream] was [viewed as] horribly offensive,” said Brad McDonald, group publisher of the influential TransWorld action sports publications. “But athletes know their earning years are limited, so it can cause a bit of a rift, because the people running the endemics have a much longer time horizon and want to see sports nurtured and kept stable, with nice steady growth, as opposed to athletes, who know their career is only so long.”
3. United athletes
Athlete groups must coalesce. If they were more organized, action athletes could have a say in improving things like judging and in clarifying the standards for qualifying for events. They could also secure insurance and other core needs.
Some, such as Casey Wasserman of the Wasserman Media Group, owner of The Familie, argue that a large group of elite athletes could negotiate higher fees from event properties, which increasingly are owned by television networks. The properties counter that their bottom lines often are in red ink, so where are the higher fees going to come from?
Well, if the industry grows, especially the televised event side, athlete groups will have leverage. Some are being organized now, including PRO, the Pro Riders Organization, which now numbers 80 athletes, including officers Chris Gentry (skateboard), Biker Sherlock (street luge) and Brian Manley (motocross).
Their bargaining power with properties is scant. But experts believe there’s opportunity in sponsorships. Several of Octagon’s top snowboarders formed The Collection this year, and in April signed PowerBar as a group sponsor.
“Until athletes come together in some uniform manner, whether as a union or something else, it’s going to be very difficult for a corporate sponsor to use the rights of a group of athletes — which, by the way, makes for a very effective point-of-purchase display,” said Fuse’s Carter. “[Players associations] allow a property sponsor to show imagery from a number of athletes, even those they don’t sponsor directly. In action, we don’t have that.”
In their hands-off attitudes toward athlete groups, the networks suggest they know the groups could be powerful someday. Dew Tour executives waved off overtures from nascent athlete groups this winter, telling them, in effect, “You decide who reps you, and we’ll go from there.” ESPN’s Semiao, who didn’t gain his influence by lacking in opinions, said, “I’m not going to express an opinion” when asked for one.
4. Don’t forget the grass roots
Action sports may be a participation-and-equipment juggernaut, but so is golf — and now that sport’s participation and equipment sales are flat. The corporate side — sponsors, networks, event properties — runs the risk of losing touch with participants unless it’s perceived as integral to the industry and involved.
“You never want to walk away from your effort to bring new people into the sports,” Carter said. “Other sports have been hurt in the past by not investing in grassroots activities that continually feed people into the system.”
The Dew Tour will incorporate the pre-existing Dew Free Flow Tour as a grassroots qualifying system, much as the U.S. Golf Association allows all golfers to try to qualify for the U.S. Open. It’s another effort to energize action sports with traditional-sports elements.
