For Sponsors, It’s the Board Games

Snowboarders are about Smashmouth, baggy pinstripes and the made-for-television mayhem of snowboard cross. Figure skaters are Russian folk songs, sparkling sequins and choreography that leaves little to chance.

That cultural divide also has been evident in sponsorship deals brokered by the two camps. Figure skaters glide toward middle-of-the-road brands, including Smuckers, Campbell’s and State Farm. Board riders tilt toward Volcom clothing, Burton snowboards and Sony PlayStation.

But the commercial appeal of board riders is likely to build in the wake of the Turin Games.

“Extreme athletes have been talking directly to the kid who’s picking up a skateboard,” said Matthew Lalin, executive vice president of Steiner Sports, a New Rochelle, N.Y., sports marketing firm. “Now they’re starting to talk to the rest of the household.”

Corporate America isn’t going to end its long-standing love affair with figure skaters whose Olympic performances -- tape-delayed or otherwise -- regularly draw the largest U.S. television audience for the Winter Games.

“If we want to reach a female audience, nothing delivers better than the figure skating,” said Mike Lynch, senior vice president of event and sponsorship marketing for Visa USA, who returned this week from Turin. “But if you’re trying to reach young adults, that’s where the action sports really come into play.”

Snowboarding’s arrival, however, was eased by the fact that no superstars emerged in the traditional Olympic events.

“The very fact we’re having this conversation on Thursday, and nobody has yet to jump out of the television set tells you something,” said Stephen Greyser, a Harvard professor who studies sports marketing. “No one person has become the compelling endorsement figure for the 2006 Olympics.”

Turin marked the third Winter Games for board riders, but few mainstream corporations gave extreme or action sports stars a second glance until 2002. That’s when the home team won five medals in Salt Lake City -- including the top three positions in the men’s halfpipe, which gave the country its first Winter Games sweep since the men’s figure skating competition in 1956.

The strong performance by U.S. snowboarders in Turin “is a continuation of what happened four years ago,” said Ron Semiao, senior vice president of original entertainment at ESPN, which broadcasts the X Games. “There is a greater acceptance for board sports, snowboarding in particular, and the [Olympic] exposure is giving the sports an even stronger foundation.”

Board riders share an appealing trait with the ice princesses -- unlike curling, bobsledding and speedskating, the two sports remain in the public eye after the Olympic flame has been extinguished.

The parade of competitions, made-for-television events and live performances give figure skaters “an edge in terms of marketability,” said Bob Dorfman, executive creative director at Pickett Advertising in San Francisco and editor of the quarterly Sports Marketers’ Scouting Report.

Board riders also benefit from an extended season that includes the X Games on ESPN, as well as the growing wealth of online content and video games that showcases the sport and its athletes. Turin suggests that “action sports are now mainstream,” Lynch said. “The snowboard cross in particular has really broken out and proved itself as the most exciting thing to have happened in the Olympic Games in the past 20 years.”

It’s about time, said Steve Astephen, a Carlsbad-based sports marketer who has been promoting action sports and extreme athletes for nearly a decade. Astephen, whose agency now is owned by Los Angeles-based Wasserman Media Group, used to begin his sales pitch with what he called “an Action Sports 101 primer.”

“None of them had a clue as to what I was talking about during the late ‘90s and early 2000s,” Astephen said. “I got laughed out of Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. The interest just wasn’t there.”

There are exceptions. Well before Turin, retailing giant Target had added red-headed board rider Shaun White to its growing stable of action sports athletes. Visa, which has had a long association with figure skater Michelle Kwan, also signed Seth Wescott, the gold medal winner in the men’s snowboard cross event, and teammate Lindsey Jacobellis, who will be remembered for falling with a huge lead and the finish line in sight.

The Olympic contests are only one factor in the sponsorship-derby equation. “The athlete has to perform, has to have personality and has to attain visibility,” Greyser said.

On that score, sports marketers said, few Olympic athletes have a more compelling story to tell than Emily Hughes, the 17-year-old skater who rushed to Italy after Kwan withdrew. Her seventh-place finish Thursday puts her well ahead of where she would have been -- back at high school -- had Kwan been able to skate.

Though Sasha Cohen did win a silver, “had she won the gold, she would have been the one jumping out of the television set, so to speak,” Greyser said. “A silver just doesn’t present as compelling a case.”

The wealth of “to be continued” storylines created by U.S. figure skaters will provide the fodder that the corporate marketing machinery will need as the skaters move onto their world championships next month in Calgary and the Vancouver Games in 2010.

Other athletes who will get a second look include Wescott, who has appeared on “Late Show with David Letterman” to read a Top Ten list of things Olympian. Marketers might still have interest in Jacobellis.

“It would have been a cleaner, simpler story line if she brought home the gold,” said Kevin Keller, a professor of marketing at the Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business. “She did celebrate before she hit the finish line, but I don’t think it was too flip or too irreverent.”

Dorfman suspects marketers will build on Jacobellis’ slip: “Lindsey is going to have an incredible story line” heading into the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, Dorfman said. “Can she come back from the terrible gaffe in the race when she lost the gold?”

Visa’s Lynch suspects marketers will show increased interest in Ted Ligety, a skier who won the country’s only Alpine medal when he took the combined event. Ligety also is considered a favorite in Saturday’s slalom, where he could add another gold.

But Turin also proved to be a winter of discontent for several athletes who were expected to dominate their sports.

Kwan left Turin without competing because of a pre-existing injury and is now an elder stateswoman at 25. Visa continues to show a spot that features her, but Coca-Cola dropped an advertisement because Kwan no longer was skating.

“Michelle will be fine,” said Shep Goldberg, Kwan’s longtime business agent. “She didn’t win a gold in 1998 or 2002, but people recognize who she is and what she stands for. The decision to leave Turin only enhanced that reputation.”

And, as if on cue, Walt Disney Co. announced Feb. 16 that Kwan has been hired to serve as a celebrity spokesman for its various businesses.

Bode Miller struck out in his first four attempts at winning a medal. He’ll ski again Saturday in the slalom, but it is questionable, marketers said, whether he’ll score more endorsements.

“Bode Miller has gone from anointed to disjointed in Turin,” Greyser said. “He’s not really in play anymore, other than for what he was able to [arrange] beforehand.”

Speedskater Shani Davis’ resounding victory in the 1,000 meters and his silver medal in the 1,500 could have been a marketing springboard for the 23-year-old from Chicago, who became the first black athlete to earn individual gold at a Winter Olympics.

But Davis sent mixed signals when he declined to compete on a U.S. relay team that subsequently was trounced. He appeared sullen during a post-race interview with an NBC correspondent, and feuded with teammate Chad Hedrick -- who created his own public image problems by talking about matching Eric Heiden’s five individual gold medals during the 1980 Games -- and then falling dramatically short.

“Shani had a chance to capture the world,” said Keith J. Kreiter, president of Edge Sports International Inc., which represents several other Olympic athletes.

“He is a wonderful kid, and I was one of many in the [corporate sponsorship] industry who was predicting that he would be the big story if he won the gold.”

Said Lalin: “Both guys -- Davis and Hedrick -- failed to handle things the right way. A lot of very competitive people at the Olympics handled themselves with a lot more grace, so I don’t think there’s going to be much interest in either of them in corporate America.”