Fuse

Orange was everywhere at the U.S. Open of Snowboarding this year. Orange fireworks exploded in the night, orange lights shined on the slopes, orange limousines picked up athletes, and orange tents dotted both sides of Stratton Mountain in Vermont.

“We believe it has to be more than just the tent,” said Fuse partner Issa Sawabini.

The plan Fuse designed for SoBe in 2007 and carried out this March surrounded consumers with SoBe’s orange logo. It was considered the strongest on-site effort in several years by SoBe, which has been activating at the U.S. Open since 2000.

“Any brand can go up on a mountain and hand out drinks,” SoBe’s Brian Stephenson said. “But they did it in a way that was completely relevant and fit in with the way a lifestyle brand would do it — not a beverage brand.”

Fuse, headquartered in Burlington, Vt., has been designing similar activation programs for years and in the process has made a name for itself as a premier action sports agency with deep knowledge of youth marketing. It managed 193 media events and activation programs in 2007. Its experiential marketing program for the New Balance Zip at X Games won a 2007 EX Award for the Best Activation of a Sports Sponsorship.

But it was the program designed for SoBe that earned the most kudos over the last year. The program touched all parts of the event and included: orange fireworks blasts; a SoBe logo landing area for Big Air competitors; a SoBe-wrapped limousine for athletes traveling from one side of Stratton to the other; and a tent where consumers pedaled mountain bikes attached to a blender to make SoBe slushies.

“It’s hard to pull events like that off and keep people’s attention, but they made it exciting and not lame,” said Eli Lesser-Goldsmith, a 29-year-old Web designer from Vermont who attended the U.S. Open. “They were just blowing it out.”